An IPA from Utah! I didn’t think they were allowed to do sinful things like make beer in the nation of Deseret, home of the beehive, and last bastion of beehives on women’s heads. Actually, when that nutty ultra-Mormon guy, Jeffers or something, was being hunted by the FBI because god apparently told him to stockpile weapons and little girls, all his other wives had something on their heads that looked rather like a trilobite, not a beehive.
But the problems of Utah aside, here’s an actual Salt Lake beer, from Uinta Brewery, which is as difficult to pronounce as it looks. Not much info on the bottle other than it’s 7.3% alk, whew, but the picture on the label is great, like those old postcards before photoshop with captions like “Just another day on the farm in Calhoun County!” with a farmer standing next to an 8-foot tall tomato.
The color is a pleasing orange, halfway from pale and amber, and there’s no effervescing bubbles here at all, and a light head… and sure enough, this beer is virtually uncarbonated. Which kinda creeps me out. It’s like beer-ade, a hop flavored juice drink. The taste is all right, decent beer body and the hops be noshing their green teeth indeed in this pint.
Hops are strong, the beer body is solid below them, in fact the body is pretty sexy under there. Lemony notes, almost apricot if you concentrate on it. But it’s 99.9% flat, which ruins a whole lot of the good tastes here. If this was carbonated, like at all, it’d probably rate somewhere in the 7-8 range. But being flat as a jilted prom date, i have to rate this as highly unrecommended.
Maybe i got a defective bottle. The cap seemed sealed tight, i don’t know. Or maybe Utah doesn’t forbid brewing beer, only lawfully allowing beer so nasty to taste that Mormons won’t be tempted? All i can rate is what comes out of the bottle, and without carbonation, this is truly horrid. A 0.8 is all i can realistically give this beer. It’s a total shame, because i had my eye on this one on the grocery shelf for months and was really looking forward to finally trying it. Bleh.