Well, Dale’s, and perhaps more accurately Oskar Blues, is such an extraordinarily well-established brand in (relatively) contemporary US brewing, that a certain degree of reverence is required here even before one opens the can.

The pour is much lighter than I was expecting – I don’t know why – but it initially seems very golden. Some sticky lace as one would expect.

The nose offers plenty of that well-known onion, but the upfront tastes seem astonishingly sweet. Not in a cloying way that some US DIPAs used to do back in the day with heavy, syrupy notes, but rather just ridiculously, saccharin sweet.

After that, and as things even out, warm up and settles down some, we get back to a big, bruising, sweet DIPA in the classic sense of the style, but that persistent, frankly quite ofd, sweetness, never really goes away. It feels unique. Alcohol is there but is manageable, but there is a solvent element in the mid-palate and back end. It finishes with more onion bitterness.

When you get a beer from a brewery this well-established and in a style that they have been around from a long time, it leads me to believe that this is a beer that has existed in one form or another for quite some time, and either marketed or brewed with tweaks for a while.

This is bit of a throwback beer and I don’t think that’s just my imagination.