India Pale Ale, Avery

Today’s beer has a penchant for the non-sensical.  I say penchant because it isn’t non-sensical itself, but only has a faint wafting of weird.  It is an IPA from Colorado, making it a traditional sea-faring beer from the mountains.  It is a fine beer that you can easily find in cans.  It is very bitter yet has a creamy head.  The Avery employee in this video claims to drink it 500 days a year.  In the words of almost anyone who works with small children, “That’s silly!”  But we don’t care how silly a brew may be, we’ll drink it nonetheless.  Therefore I present to you, Avery’s India Pale Ale.

Darker than your average IPA.

The first thing you encounter is a huge hop aroma veritably billowing out of the glass.  Like the Israelites’ pillar of smoke leading them to the promised land, it leads you into an oddly creamy head and a biting hop flavor.  It is certainly easy to believe three of the four hop varieties used clock double digit alpha acids.  Bitterness isn’t the whole story though.  Floral notes get an assist in too, enabling you to take more than one, painful sip.  The balance is, well, angled.  While neither side of the scale is touching the base, the slope of the line between them is probably close to 4 over 5.  Of course that’s just a guesstimate.  I didn’t have graphing paper to plot it nor a protractor to measure it nor a scale to weigh it.  I had to use the grid on and Andy doll shirt and visualise the angle with the shaft of a pen.  Plus, a weight comparison is meaningless between malt and hops anyway because of the differing matter densities in each.  Okay, I’m sorry!

My mathematical tools.

Anyway, this beer is heavy on the hops with not much malty sweetness to level the playing field.  If you’ve really been craving an IPA, Avery’s India Pale Ale is perfect for jolting you back into the world of bitter beer.  On the other hand, if you just kinda want something hoppy, only plan on drinking one before moving on.  I would hate for you to be in a position where the strong bite stopped you from being able to enjoy such a tasty beverage.