This is the follow-up post to the other day’s description of BrewDog’s new Atlantic IPA. You may remember that thebeer spent nearly 2 months on on a fishing trawler in the north Atlantic before finding its way into a bottle and eventually into my gut.
I split the bottle the brewery sent me with buddy Russ — co-author of TwinBeer.com — who was visiting for the weekend to run in the 2009 Maine Half-Marathon (check out his review of the beer here). The BrewDog Atlantic IPA poured an orangish brown with a very thin head that disappeared pretty quickly.
Unlike the American hop monsters you’re probably familiar with that boast plenty of citrus and fruit flavors, the hop wallop of the Atlantic IPA is much more spicy and piney. The beer is loaded with classic English and Noble hops like East Kent Goldings and Bramling Cross, yielding a pretty in-your-face 90 IBUs.
While it definitely tastes like an English IPA, there are plenty of complexities and interesting flavors obtained I’m sure during the beer’s time at sea. There is a lot of vanilla and smoked oak (maybe pirate ship?) in both the nose and the taste, I’m sure from the oak barrels. And I picked up some tobacco too, when the beer was nearing room temperature.
But the one thing I picked up on a lot which Russ didn’t mention was an whole lot of salt flavor. Not in a bad way, in fact it made the beer really interesting, especially as it warmed. But the sea salt definitely got to this one during its time on the ship.
The neat part about the beer was the fact that it truly was a once-in-a-lifetime beer. Even if BrewDog goes on to try and recreate the beer, it will never turn out exactly the way it did this round (since I’m sure the sea would yield different results every time). Would I pay $26 for it on my own? No, probably not. Was it delicious and unlike anything I had had before? Yes, absolutely.
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