First and foremost, I'd like to wish a happy and safe National IPA Day to everyone. Hopefully you are doing something exciting for the occasion. I chose to try an IPA from an up and coming brewery: Hangar 24. Located in Redlands, California, Hangar 24 has recently started to distribute their beers around Southern California. I had their Orange Wheat a few months back and was fairly impressed, so when I was looking for a new IPA to try for National IPA Day, their Columbus IPA caught my eye. Recently, more and more single hop IPAs have been popping up and this is one of them. A single hop IPA is a beer that uses only one hop variety instead of mixing a few together, like most IPAs do. The hop that Hangar 24 chose to showcase with this beer is the Columbus variety.
Columbus IPA pours a very hazy deep amber color with an orange hue. The head rose up quickly in the glass and took a long time to settle, which isn't something I typically see in an IPA. The smell had a nice citrus hop aroma with big notes of grapefruit pith and a bit of caramel in the background. After a few minutes though, the smell changed and became slightly less pleasant as notes of hop resin and cat (you hear me, cat) took over.
The taste, for me, was a bit off. At first, I picked up some lemon curd and grapefruit. Quickly, this was cut off by a sharp hit of pine hops. Soon after that, a taste of aspirin and pine sap rose up in my mouth. For me, the flavors didn't quite work together and the end result was a beer that felt a bit unpolished. It was far from being the worst IPA I've ever had (*cough* Kennebunkport IPA) but it was far from what I would consider to be a good IPA.
Final Grade: B-
Top 100 Beers Tasted: 25
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