Centennial IPA, Founders Brewing Company

When I was in sixth grade, I played for my school's basketball team.  Maybe that's why we lost every game that season.  Anyway, our last game of the year saw us pitted against a team that was way out of our league.  We couldn't get anything past them.  Finally, in the last four minutes when we knew we were gonna get creamed, our coach told us to forget about it and just have fun.  Those last four minutes were the best we played that entire year.  This story is more than just a real life example of a cheesy sports flick, its message of letting your hair down and enjoying yourself to succeed is mirrored in the makers of today's beer.  Founders Brewing Company was founded in 1997 by a pair of avid homebrewers who had recently graduated from college.  For some reason, they decided to make average beers.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe they thought they'd ease in to the better beer world.  Anyway, this wasn't working and they found themselves on the brink of bankruptcy.  It was at that point they chose to let loose and brew something they personally liked and the company took off.  Since then, Founders has consistently produced highly acclaimed beers and been ranked as one of the world's best breweries.  One of those beers is its Centennial IPA.

A word you hear thrown around beer reviews quite often is "citrus."  Citrus flavors like grapefruit can come from the yeast strain used or the hops.  Whenever it comes from hops though, the word is a little off.  We use it because it's the closest thing, like translating between different alphabets.  We refer to pre-revolutionary Russian rulers as tsars (Don't let anyone tell you it's czar.  They're liars!) because we don't know how to say цар.  We say citrus because we don't know how to say ____ (I can't type it for you because that would imply that we actually do know how to say ____).  I might describe ____ as eating a stick that's been rubbed with a lemon or if flowers were made out of vinegar.  Okay, maybe citrus is the best word after all, but the stick idea conveys the resiny quality.  This comes from the fact that hops contain resins.  Duh.  So I guess I'll label the aroma citrusy and sticky (as in the "What's brown and sticky?" joke).

Centennial IPA has a lot of reviews posted online already.  They run the gamut from a 240 pixel video of what appears to be an unenthused football fan who knows what he's talking about to an HD video of a woefully improper pour.  In one video, the reviewer doesn't like it because it's too malty for an IPA, but malty is not an adjective that immediately comes to mind.  It claims 65 IBUs and makes full use of every last one.  I'm actually surprised that Founders was able to build a grain bill large enough to support 7.2% ABV while maintaing such a strong bite from a relatively modest IBU score.  There is a very strong malt backbone, but it supports the hops, rather than trying to steal the limelight.  Maybe the store from which this guy bought his bottle had kept it for a long time, allowing the unfiltered beer to condition into a milder brew.  With the exception of this review, they were all very positive and justly so.  RateBeer gives it 99 out of 100 both in its style and overall.  BeerAdvocate gives it 92 from users and 99 from "The Bros."  Probably the most impressive endorsement is that it is often used as a benchmark for judges in contests.

Many reviewers pointed out that this beer doesn't taste as alcoholic as it is.  One even goes as far as to posit it as a session beer.  I am  convinced that  people use the term "session beer" far too often.  They sound like nerdy third graders that just learned the words equilateral, scalene and isosceles.  They don't normally talk about triangles so much, they just want to show off their big kid vocabulary.

It's a right triangle.

But even though that reviewer's use of the term "session beer" was unjustified, it illustrates how smooth this beer is.  Perhaps it tricks you into attributing some of the alcohol's bite to the hops.  However it does it, the result is a beer that's easy to drink.

The best part of all these reviews is that Centennial IPA is not the most highly rated beer from Founders.  That intrigues me more than when a friend from China told me that Kung Fu Hustle was Stephen Chow's worst movie.  What else is out there?

By the way, the punch line for the "What's brown and sticky?" joke is a stick.