Double Wide IPA, Boulevard Brewing Company

When we find something and deem it good, we have a tendency to want more of it.  This is what gives us chocolate chocolate chip cookies.  Does it really need chocolate chips?  It has also brought us into a world where you can sit down and pick from hundreds of channels.  You pay for that?  Sometimes the results are quite disastrous, as when we develop a taste for tanning.

Am I cool yet?

It seems we always pursue good things until they become at best silly and at worst monstrous.  But this doesn't have to be the case.  Today's beer is a Double IPA (DIPA).  It would be really easy for this style to be a catch-all for hop bombs and many DIPAs are just that, but not all.  Many times, brewers get it right and Boulevard Brewing Company got it right with its Double-Wide IPA.

That's my new glass.  Ain't she a beaut?

This is my second beer from Boulevard's Smokestack series, a collection of beers meant to explore the broad horizons of brewing.  The smell is coy in its subtlety.  Not in your face, but not faint either.  It's fruity like you would expect from an IPA, but the breadiness holds its own quite well for being out of its element.  The flavor is all hops.  I bet this is what the makers of all those unbalanced hop bombs are going for.  They just don't hit it though.  Double-Wide effortlessly delivers the biting hoppiness and tart mouthfeel you crave without sacrificing a full body or drinkability.  Drinking it affords you a taste of a genuinely extreme beer but unlike the girls in the picture, you won't look back with regrets.

So far this Smokestack series is showing that the world of imperial beers can be larger than just stouts and barley wines.  Like The Sixth Glass does for quadrupels, Double-Wide helps raise DIPA's standing to fine zymurgic art.

That's yeast painting.  In case you're a little lost.
Looks kind of Damien Hirst.