IPAs and More IPAs: Racer 5 and Victory HopDevil

Today we pit an under-appreciated West Coast IPA versus a famous East Coast counterpart. This set-up no doubt tips my hand, but here we go.

Victory HopDevil
This is a pretty famous beer. This may be a result of the label, one I would put in the top ten for American beers. You can't look at that label and not feel your hand reaching, as if ... possessed. I have had periodic bottles and been unimpressed, but it was time to give this east coast bigwig another shot.

It's a surprisingly dark beer, well into the amber realm, nudging its way toward brown. All well and good. The aroma is resinous and foresty--some day I'll make a study of tree scents so I can speak accurately about the way beers smell. I'm calling this one Noble Fir. The East Coast seems to be characterized by cleaner hopping. On the west coast, we go for funk--tangy, fuzzy, green (see below) funk. HopDevil has more of a clean, British hop nose. The big problem I have is with the malt bill, which gives a harsh, tannic note. The hopping isn't especially strident, but when combined with this, the result is somewhat punishing tipple. But such a cool label! Call it a gentleman's B-.

Racer 5
Bear Republic's familiar IPA wasn't the first one I thought of. Sifting through various California offerings, I found myself nonplussed by AleSmith, which I've never had (and failed to take notes on). (Jeez, two sentence-ending prepositions--dicey business.) I also confirmed my lack of enthusiasm for Stone and Lagunitas. Green Flash turned out to be too much of a double IPA (though nicely done), and so here came Racer 5. I recalled it pretty fondly in my memory, and was surprised to find that it had one two gold and two silver medals at the GABF. It, too, is right on the edge for a standard-issue IPA: 7%, with "75+" IBUs. I've been making my judgment based on presentation, and tasting this, it actually behaves like a standard IPA.

It looks like we now think IPAs should: hazy golden, with a diffident head that vanished after little fight. The aroma is both familiar but also impressive: loads of piquant citrus, a decent alcohol plume, and something that smells a lot like what I would imagine ganja smells like--if, you know, I'd ever smelled it. That note rises with the temperature. The flavor is similarly familiar but unique. It's actually a pretty sweet beer, with apricot fruitiness that gets drawn out by the hops (four Cs: Chinook, Columbus, Cascade, Centennial). There's a darker, pine tar bitterness that seems to have some connection to the ganja nose, plus lots of grapefruit. It's quite a distinctive IPA, and my appreciation grew throughout. Houston, we have a winner. Call it a very solid A-, with the likelihood that it's an A being thwarted my my fear of grade inflation.
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IPAs and More IPAs: Nøgne Ø

Okay, one more from my IPA project. (Still secret!) Today we travel to Norway for Nøgne Ø's huge, 7.5% IPA.

Nøgne Ø IPA
Pours out a viscous, dare I say gloppy, amber, heavy with chunky lees. The aroma is nice--caramel and toast, but not a huge hop presence. (When a beer travels half way around the world, you can't complain too much if the subtler hop aromas aren't as intense as they would be at the brewery.) Alcohol vents in waves. I've never been to Scandinavia, and as far as I know, it is a gentle pocket of strangely glorious warmth, a place wherein all the citizens have conspired to promote it as an arctic wasteland to keep out the interlopers. But thinking as I do that it is an arctic wasteland, I am comforted to find a body of such heft and muscle that Sally handed me her half of the beer with an "Uggh." Ha, no Viking are you!

Given that it's a 7.5% beer, the purported 60 BUs of hopping seem awfully pronounced to me. They wish to push me around and grow hair on my chest. Resinous, maybe a wee harsh and sharp (Cascades and Chinook), but they somehow go with the thick malt, which is more viscous than creamy. A bit of plum to boot. It's a robust but homey beer--rustic.

The fellows who started Nøgne Ø take pride at having brought IPAs to Norway, and I expect the Norwegians thank them. An IPA like this is burly enough to stand up to a stiff wind howling across the ice floes. I hope that they point out, however, that their version comes straight from America's West Coast, where we have been using the same ales to temper our more modest rainy winters. Call it a solid B--strong but not super subtle.
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BrewDog's Atlantic IPA

[For an introduction to Scotland's BrewDog Brewery, start with this post.]

When BrewDog announced plans for Atlantic IPA, the detail that captured people's attention was the process: the brewery planned to send out a few casks on the family mackerel trawler in an effort to re-create the beers sent to India in the 18th Century. The fact that has captured our attention now is the price tag: $26 per 330 ml. (Or, as Bill amusingly calculated, a six-pack equivalent of $167.76.)

I was no different. When BrewDog sent out the press release announcing the beer (and offering to send me a bottle--which, needless to say, I accepted), I was so shocked that I requested confirmation. Yup, twenty-six bucks.

Can any beer be worth the price of a nice bottle of single malt Scotch?

As with so many things in life, this turns out to be the wrong question. The beer is compelling, strange, unexpected, unique. We'll get to the tasting notes in a minute, but very briefly, it is a fascinating beer. Of course, lots of beers are fantastic and at a fraction the cost. The mind immediately formulates the question like a math equation. My favorite beer is X. X is $9 a bottle. Is Atlantic IPA three times as good as X?

The better question is, knowing what the brewery went through to make this beer, what would you pay? Only seven casks were made, and of this, only 960 bottles made it to America. (Whether that's 959 after my bottle, I can't say.) But even that doesn't capture the the scope of things. Fortunately, there's a video that does. Have a look:



Ah, now it's clear. This was a crazy scheme of the kind that brewers are prone to conduct. It was far harder than they predicted and not apparently the process a brewery can implement on a commercial basis. It's a nutty, charming, crazy experiment, and seeing it on video, one I approve of. I am left with surprise they allowed any of this beer out of the country or, for that matter, out of the brewery.

Tasting Notes
To complete the sea-aging experiment, BrewDog found an old recipe--either 150 or 200 years old; their material quotes both ages. Given that agriculture has changed so much in that time (not to mention the earth's climate), I don't imagine that the beer they brewed tastes like the ancient inspiration. The brewery used ancient English hops, but probably only Goldings (born in the 1780s) date back 200 years. Fuggles, the other hop in the recipe, is also an old strain, but is about a century younger. Maris Otter is typically used to approximate historic malts--as BrewDog has done with Atlantic IPA--but I have no idea how similar it is to the malts of the early-to-mid 19th Century. Still, the recipe seems a worthy effort to replicate an old recipe given ingredients available in the 21st Century.

(Discussion point for homebrew masters and brewing historians. This recipe produced a beer of 8.5% alcohol and 80 IBUs. Do you suppose that a recipe translated directly across the board today would produce a beer of both lower alcohol and bitterness? I'm wondering if modern malt is more easily converted and if IBUs have crept up over the decades. It's possible that BrewDog adjusted for these changes, but I toss it out as a hypothetical, anyway.)

I poured out the beer, as usual, in the evening, when the light was crappy. My photos are not worth reproducing, so we'll have to rely on description. It pours thickly, but rouses a nice off-white head. The color is amber, as in the gem, with rich orange highlights. (At least, it does when you hold it in front of a light.) The nose is spicy and alcoholic, quite a bit like an English barleywine.

The flavor is unique. A triumverate of notes compete for dominance. Caramel from the malt, and the spicy, resinous hops--these are familiar and unsurprising. But then there's the salt, unmistakeable and insistent, like the brine in shellfish. As the beer opened up, the hops emerge in a fizzy citrus note (orange). The brewery's tasting notes offer "pine," but I think spruce, which has this citrusy quality, is closer to the mark. Perhaps due to the saline, there's a mild metalic note, like blood. I got a touch of vanilla as well, perhaps from the oak. I also got just a touch of char or smoke--probably the note BrewDog calls "tobacco." It finishes surprisingly dryly. For all the alcohol in the nose, the thick body, and the caramel palate, it's not a bit sweet.

I couldn't easily rate the beer, but if it were on tap in a pub, it would be the first beer I'd recommend. There's really nothing like it on the market.

Stats
Malts: Maris Otter (98%), amber malt
Hops: Goldings, East Kent Goldings, Fuggles
ABV: 8.5%
IBU: 80
OG 1.074 (18 P)
Availability: extremely rare (960 bottles), $26

"Worth" is not something we're used to assessing. In this case, if you judge the beer solely by what's in the glass, stripped of all other concerns, you'd conclude that, while interesting, it's hardly four or five times as good as world standards. On the other hand, these may be the last 960 (or 959) bottles of sea-aged IPA available for years or decades. Is it worth $26 to taste this salty, unique experiment? That's an altogether harder question to answer.