Ding Points = 45.00

Pour: 50, Nose: 50, Palate: 40, Feel: 60, Global: 40

Tasting Notes:

22 oz gold foiled (neck) bottle with the usual Terrapin Side Project presentation; this is #15 in the Side Project series.

WTF is a ‘German Style Wheat IPA’?? Germans across the globe are more horrified than they were in 1966.

The beer pours a clouded, golden color. Darker than a standard Hefe and with nowhere near the requisite head, retention or lace.

The nose offers a DULL, sweetish hop note that fails to excite. Drab.

Tastes are (unsurprisingly) very, very odd. At first we get that sweet banana note that one might normally associate with a normal Hefeweizen. However, this is almost immediately brutalized by a barrage of bitter, uncompromising, ignorant hops that trample all over the subtlety. The combination of (and fight between) these flavors ends up with both on the floor in a double, simultaneous knockout of sanity. A dry finish completes the massacre for me, with a lingering sweet and sour bitterness that reminds me of beer that has been left out overnight.

Alcohol is there, and the beer feels like a chemistry experiment gone wrong. Nasty.

I guess my question is this. Why take all the great attributes of a German Hefeweizen (the banana and clove elements, the fantastic head in terms of retention and lace, the warm weather drinkability and the ‘classic’ nature of the beer) and replace it with the antithesis of all of those things in the name of ‘innovation’? A tragic error, but one that has become commonplace in the US.

Other: Green’s on Buford, Atlanta, GA, USA. $7.99, 7.3 ABV%.