IPA week chugs along with another fantastic draft-only offering. Hell if Taco Bell can do a world class burrito bowl, I figure I can try my hand at rating a world class IPA. Back in yesteryear this was on the top 100 and haunting the top IPAs but it has since subsided into relative anonymity BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN IT ISN’T AMAZING. Let’s get after it in today’s review
Mashing out on growler only gems, on the reg.
Selin’s Grove Brewing Company
Pennsylvania, United States
American IPA | 7.00% ABV
A: There is a nice translucence with brassy straw meets gold hues. The carbonation, despite being shipped thousands of miles, is still holding strong and flexes hard with moderate lacing. You might be partial to some off shelf selections, but sometimes you gotta walk in someone else’s liver.
This beer reminds me of simpler IPA times, when Ruination was enough to turn your bitter zones inside out like a Gusher’s commercial.
S: The smell was actually pretty tame and almost went a light honey route with some grassiness and playground romping. There’s a dull lemon rind but nothing really blasting my face off with hop oils. Perhaps there is a precision in execution like a trebuchet, but again, for a world class IPA, I would say Sculpin rustles my jimmies more than this.
T: The taste is even more tame and pops a percocet and slides you a small saucer of light citrus, pale malt, creamy middle body like a baked biscuit with a bitter finish. This isn’t something that makes me lose it, and with a 2 liter serving size, I am positive I got my fair share.
I was expecting the R8 of the IPA world and instead got the A4. Which is still nice, but I don’t see Tony Stark drinking this IPA is all I am saying guize.
M: The mouthfeel is incredibly light and washes away clean. There is a sweetness to it with barely any lingering hops. The dank hop oils might be lingering somewhere in there but it feels more watery and refreshing like an alcoholic’s sports drink more so than a big hop warhead. Maybe I am just too demanding, MAYBE I AM JUST LIKE MY BREWER, he’s never satisfied. This is what it sounds like, when hops cry.
D: This is exceptionally drinkable, slick and watery and obliges the dancefloor amiably with a waxed surface of water and pine hops, and that is about it. Consuela has done an expert job pulling off the balance between an impressive IPA and something you can drink at the lake. In the end, nothing I would lose my oils over, just leaves me with blue cones.
This is an amiable delicious IPA that anyone can get their mouth on. However, this gentle demeanor makes it less memorable, even the Mouth of the South would agree.
Narrative: Narrative: “I hate yearbooks” you grit your teeth and attempt to conjure up a page worth of something to commemorate all the good times with. “WHATTT WHO HATES YEARBOOKS, TYLER JUST WRITE WHAT YOU FEEL!” You know that Geometry was fun, that the pranks were the best, but what do you say to a person in a single yearbook page to sum up all the good times? How do you commemorate the fading visions of the past? Suddenly it clicks and your pen cannot keep up with your Dostoyevskian insight, eevery phrase parsed perfectly, with Hemingway precision, terse but fantastically executed, insightful self referential quotes fold into themselves like mitochondrial membranes, you scribble out your signature and hand it to her. “You wrote ‘I cant believe that they closed Hot N’ Now’? And then signed it with someone elses name? What does this mean Tyler?” She doesn’t get it, you flip your aviators and walk away, you are too bad ass for memories, too bad ass for yearbooks, and you sure don’t need to spend your life living on a semiglossy page. You are Tyler and you live in the moment. The smell of the IROC tires lingered in the air, peppering the masses for effect.
dontdrinkbeer 