You see me use the phrase now and then, “hoppier than thou,” to describe the mania for IPA’s this decade, the nutty competition among craft brewers to come up with a recipe or some technique resulting in the most hop-encrusted beer in the world. Yes, this is unique to America, bless its little green heart. There are some who predict that the next dance craze will be the saison style of beer, some who think it will be the pilsener. I think those people are nuts.
There’s subtle shadings in saisons and pilseners, afficionados can tell between two of the same animal, tiny signs in the carbonation and coloration. Makes me think of a couple guys in mid-evening around a gigantic red pool table without numbers on the balls, and without pockets in the corners, when one of them sips from an oddly shaped glass and exclaims (in a British accent): “Why Master Burgage-Withers! You scoundrelous devil, you’ve used a half-dram of wheat in this pils! Oh no, you’ll not find my palate unawares on any Thursday, no Sir!”
That’s not the kind of crafty brew drinkers we have in America. No buddy, we need a blazing marker on our trail, preferably on actual fire. The whole reason hoppy beers like the IPA are the raging craze here, is that you can tell right away how heavy the hops are. I could see stouts taking off in America, because it’s easy to tell differences: “This one sits like wet cement in my guts more than that one.” But not craft pilseners, or saisons. That’s fruity lah-dee-dah stuff. In our rot-gut whiskey, we just don’t care if it’s single-rot or not.
Now back to IPA’s. There’s the sciencey thing, the IBU, Int’l Bitterness Unit, for some basic signpost, but you really don’t need to get that technical to know if your lips are twisting themselves off your face. The IPA is in your face, and you don’t need to read the friggin’ manual, and in America we don’t say friggin’. There’s one measure for IPA, the hops level and the balance with beer body. Is that two things? Are you sure? Then let me remind you of one of the cornerstones of American Wisdom: “There’s one thing Daddy likes and that’s titties and beer.” So there.
So who is hoppier than thou? This is. Sierra Nevada’s Hop Hunter IPA will twist your kisser and pucker your nips. It is the hoppiest IPA in the land, and the reason is science but we don’t need to know all that. Basic idea is this: SiNev invented a contraption, assumedly on wheels, which they roll out to the hops farm. Using steam and pressure, they rip the aromatic oils right out of the hop buds before they know what’s going on, fresh picked and suddenly shriveled by Sierra Nevada’s mobile hop-oil vampire machine.
Then they brew a regularly high-hopped IPA, add in the stolen hop oil, and this is what you get. Not only hops, but the souls of sacrificed baby hops. Wooo, that’s the right stuff. To keep all these volatile aromatic oils in solution the alk has to be high, 6.2% in this case, and it comes out the pipe at 60 IBU’s. There are higher IBU’s to be dranked, but now we know, that it’s not about the number, it’s about HOW you hop it up.
And then there’s that pesky balance, where so many brewers get it wrong. Hop Hunter has got it right. A quite pale color to this drink, but they use some very good malts which shine just below the sheen of hop oil. A tiny sweetness, just enough to make the bitter hops into exotic fruit flavors, and it’s really a surprise that they can get such a flavorful beer body into something so light in color. Extra surprise that a malt even exists, which can stand on two legs behind this wild hopslaught.
Suff to say, that the elusive balance is there, and in spades. SiNev knows what they’re doing by now, 35 years in the biz, and with a touch of technical wizardry they’ve solved the puzzle of hops. This is Hoppier Than Thou, bottled. Heck, even my burps taste like a pine branch. By now it should be obvious that this one is in my Top Five IPA’s. In fact, it’s #2 with a 9.5 rating, just behind the exquisite Finestkind by Smuttynose.