More plugs for Alpine brewing this week and another amazing DIPA that is frustratingly hard to find these days. Used to be you could walk into a Whole Foods, give Fabio a high five and pick up a couple bottles of this. Now people on the east coast have a thirst for unbalanced hops and OUR HOP ECONOMY IS IN SHAMBLES.
Alpine Brewing, Pure Hoppiness, 8% abv, double IPA
A: Nice deep gold tones, great cabonation, spider webbing from the lacing with no middle carbonation. Looks like discontent apple juice. Apples that be all pissed and frothy.
S: Huge bouquet from a mile away, great citrus but pine and forest predominates. I love that Alpine is almost always, well Alpine. The smell is a fantastic balance between the juiciness of most DIPAs and the herbal notes from malty Imperial IPAs. IF YOU’RE WONDERING WHEN TO START WANTING IT, NOW IS A GOOD TIME.
T: Awesome hybrid of initial notes, there’s a tinge of herbal mixed with citrus. The citrus ends up riding out the party and the drying forest finish is present in the swallow. All around a great melange of the two styles. It feels like if Pliny and Maharaja had a love child. This would be the result and unsurprisingly, it is delicious. But that would never happen, most historical pundits believe Pliny the Elders homose- alas I digress.

Get all carried away with that hop blast and you forget about the 8% abv and you be all lookin like dis.
M: The mouthfeel is light with creamy coating. Great carbonation boosts the hops into the nostrils creating a create hop profile. Great maltiness that is not overdone. It’s a hot tub of hop oils all up in my bubbling mouthhole and THE BOTTOMS ARE COMING OFF.
D: This beer is really high on this note. The expansive character spread hop stickiness like a virus and your mouth is the better for it. The abv is hidden well and you could drink this in plenty of circumstances from grooming your dog, spot welding, watching past episodes of Burn Notice. The choices are endless.

You know it is the middle child, but you respect it nonetheless, interesting and good at science or whatever middle children are good at, not the baby, not the one who gets pregnant first. I am ok with that.
Narrative: The year was 2145, but that seems like just yesterday, well since they harnessed the photon retractor, everything seems like the yesterday of tomorrow. Let me explain. Corporal William Herboreal had been working as the ships botanist on an experimental mission to Titan, one of the outer moons of, well that’s not important. Upon discovering a new strain of humulus lupus, an advanced strain of hops, the oil was potent enough to power the ship, too powerful even. We cascade through time and sheered the space barrier in a way that even Immanuel Kant couldn’t’ have predicted. THE HOPS WERE TOO INTEGRATED. He kept feeding hops to the engine, its juniper rancor filling the cabin. But now we have crossed the line, fallen through time, living in the land of the hops. Yes we are living in the land of the hops.