Ding Points: 64.00
Pour: 90.00, Nose: 70.00, Palate: 60.00, Mouth: 60.00, Global: 50.00
Tasting Notes:
Dammit. Enjoy by 04.01.13 – that means that once the 4th of January has passed this is going downhill. Oh, hang on, this is America, so actually that’s April 1st. A joke? Maybe, but either way you’re hardly likely to confuse this beer with anything out of the UK!
More hype in the beer community for this and my expectations are for competence and no more. I paid $6.99 for the 22 oz bomber, this is another beer that is frankly terrible value.
Pour is a lovely bright orange one with some nice clarity. Plenty of bone-white head, with some nice retention and lace. Looks good.
As Stone suggests, there is a definite, dank, mustiness to the nose and it’s not clean. They seem to think that this is a positive attribute, but for me it lends a certain muddiness to the aroma profile. In IPA’s of all persuasions (English, smaller, American large), I much prefer nose profiles that are sharper and more well-defined.
In terms of taste there’s really not much to report here if you are familiar with bruising, America DIPA’s. This one comes with a barrage of Simcoe and Amarillo that are earthy and super-aggressive. It gets tiring on the palate quite quickly. We get a LOT of Oskar Blues Gubna onions too, which is not good, but no Summit reported in the Stone blog.
Meh, to me this is a marketing event by Stone. Get some Ruination and you’ll have a not dissimilar experiences, and there’s a million other West Coast IPA’s that will do the trick in an almost identical manner – even after 35 days removed from bottling.
For me the irony is this. If you REALLY wanted a beer that would need to benefit from freshness, why not brew something delicate that might fall to pieces quickly? With SO many hops, and SUCH a large ABV, this is one IPA/DIPA that is likely to be significantly robust for a very long time! Funny!
Other: American DIPA, 9.4% ABV.
I tell people all the time that aren’t craft beer-literate about why IPA’a are IPA’s and how the hops were meant to make the beer last for a long time. I never put two and two together to figure this one out. Now that I’ve read what you have to say it clicks in my head. Seems to me all that breweries do now is compete with each other to see who can put more hops into their respective brews.
I thought it was pretty good for a session beer, I’d love to try it on cask.
You sir are completely delusional. This beer completely demolishes nearly every DIPA out there in both aroma and taste, but with the drinkability of a light single IPA! Either you didn’t drink it at the correct temp (50-55F or perhaps even a little higher) or your nose and palate were all sorts of screwed up when you drank it. I’ve had most, but admittedly not all of the top rated DIPAs out there, and the only ones I’ve had that even hold a candle to this beer are Heady Topper and Sucks. Saying that having lots of hops should make this robust and last long shows you clearly don’t know much about how hop flavors/aromas work. Yes it can help with preserving the beer itself, but big hop-forward beers lose the actual hop flavors and aromas quite quickly, leaving behind the bitter alpha acids. None of the tropical fruit, citrus, peach, or floral flavors/aromas will remain after a relatively short amount of time, and you’ll be left with a lot of caramel malt and sharp hop bitterness. If that’s your cup of tea then so be it, but that’s not the flavor profile that they initially intend you to be drinking. It seems to me that you aren’t actually someone who even enjoys beer, but rather enjoys looking for things to dislike in beer. I don’t mind being critical, as I am reasonably critical in my own reviews, but you clearly like to be a downer for downer’s sake.