God damn I am sick of getting requests to review these fucking Who Farted cans. If you follow this site religiously, as you no doubt do, you’ll recall that I posted this prejudicial appraisal without even having tried the beers.

As a result, no fewer than eight different people from Ohio offered to send me Hoof Hearted cans for free. Ohio beer nerds trying to unseat PNW/Colorado as the most generous at every turn. The rallying behind these HH guys is inexplicable and heartwarming. In short: I couldn’t go on making light of these Italian dressing IPAs if I haven’t even tried them.  So now it’s time to put the chicken broth where my mouth is and determine if these cans are worth the hype.

PULL OUR UR DONG, ITS GETTING DANKY

How in the fuck this hasn’t caught a hot C&D from Shigeru Miyamoto is beyond me.  I doubt Nintendo would be on board for a DK Glory Hole, Kranky’s Cabin notwithstanding. Alright, white elephant in the room: this looks even worse in real life than I expected, but  I will try to focus my commentary on how the beers TASTE instead of pandering out tired visual similes until I hit my wordcount.

The nose is so over the top that it’s almost hard to frame this in the common parlance of the NE IPA realm.  You get grapefruit zest, not the juice, the white bitter pith, oily pine nugs, conifer, smashed juniper, intense evergreen and this long chronic closer like the bedroom of an 8th grade TOOL fan. It is simply way too fucking much.

The taste takes that pinecone rendering and continues to push things until you have to use your hop “safe word” which in my case is “Rhizome.” It is concurrently oily and so drying that it is paradoxical.  I cannot session these beers, it is the fury of hopslam with nothing in the body to balance things out.  If you have ever made a hilarious player in Madden with all the stats on a single trait, that’s the reality of this beer.  Amongst the hoppiest onslaught I have ever had.

yukyukyuk, slam it visually all you want, this beer is insane in a way that “doesn’t align with my flavor expectations.”

This beer is by no means bad but holy shit you have to have incredible elasticity in your hophole to accommodate the girth of this oily cone.  I am not trained enough in the alpha acid arts to equip this gear, need to grind my palate to harness these spells.

MUSK OF THE MINOTAUR:

This was my favorite beer from these guys in the respect that I could chain several of these together, tap two red mountains and fireball my palate into nothingness.  This is cleaner, less residual oils, less cut King Fir, and lends itself into a “less remarkable” tropical zone.  I will easily take the path of less resistance when their intense hoppy offerings are akin to learning how to drive stick shift in San Francisco.

This is clean and almost watery in the swallow compared to insane Konkey Dong.  I prefer this brewery when they are at their tamest because maybe these old saggy palateballs just cant keep pace with the taught coinpurse nutsacks of new money tickers. I really enjoyed the lemony/apricot/tangerine thing going on here and I never got fatigued, left me wanting more.  If these are easy for Ohio tickers to land, they have their own private Pizza Port honey hole to enjoy.

Of course HH has a Sauv barrel version of this, and I cant even begin to imagine what that experience would be like.

EVERYBODY WANTS SOME:

Pay attention to the foreground, disregard bokeh’ed out background.

If Konkey Dong was a schedule III hop water, this is top tier schedule I, essentially designed to be abused. I could barely finish half the can before this wore me out like a visit to the Social Security Administration offices.

This takes me back to a time that many readers may not have been around to witness: the Hop Wars of the late 2000s.  Stone began border aggressions with new hop blends and every brewery sought to push IBU levels increasingly higher, with the gauntlet of what was insane at that time, Ruination becoming the standard bearer.  At a certain point Hopslam entered the mix with honey and Sierra Nevada just made HOPTIMUM, which was essentially water from the bowl of your month old Christmas tree.  Never to be outdone and never one to shy away from being obnoxious: MIkkeller dropped 1000 IBUs and shattered the public’s will to power.

In the tattered remains people scampered to other sources of succor and this great war went into remission. Lower IBUs, cleaner execution or “matter in suspension” to offset things.  Well now Hoof Hearted has declared fuck all that and they are tossing piles of Reichmarks into the oven and ramping up hoppy militarization, reannexing that oily Sudetenland.

NO ONE IS STOPPING THEM.

So here we are, they took the insanely hoppy profiles of the past and joined it with the London Ale III strain, and then decided to not clarify anything. They are playing free and loose with the hop game and it is unsustainable, palates will bleed. These cans are mindbendingly bitter, compost and landscaping trimmings, chlorophyll and wheatgrass, biting into the skin of a tangelo like a savage. The cling is like the residual profile of a massive stout, but it’s just probiotic culture gathering in pools along your gumline, a de facto starter culture in your interstices.

I can understand why some people love these cans and I certainly can’t knock them for doing so, I will outright declare that I am too much of a belching birth canal to embrace this hoppy aggression. It’s too much for me, I have seen too much destruction in my time, my face hole aches.