Great Divide Titan IPA

Great Divide Brewing is on the short list of my favorite breweries that I think consistently make great beer and I will always buy when I have the chance.  However, their beer was never for sale in California, so for years this has meant buying through ebay or making bottle exchanges with wandering beer gurus.  This past fall, Great Divide Brewing signed distribution deals with Stone and since that time Great Divide beers have been showing up on shelves in SoCal.  I couldn't be happier about this and it's just another reason why we should love Stone.

When thinking of Great Divide, I generally think of their big beautiful stouts and barleywines – dare I say Yeti...  However, they make some other interesting beers outside of the big category that are very worth talking about.  This week, I present you with Titan, their single IPA.  I love that they're putting suggested food pairing on the side of their bottles; it's fantastic, it helps you to drink the beer as they intended and aids people in the difficult task of beer and food pairing.

The color is deep golden and there's just the slightest hint of cloudiness.  A fairly miniscule head, with little retention.  I smell a decent whiff of piney hops, guessing cascade, with overwhelming sweet malts.  Seriously, the malts smell so sacrine and gentle, it conjures up mental images of powdered sugar.

The body is on the heavier side for a single and it definitely coats your mouth with its thick resinous hop and sweet malt flavors.  This beer has a hop bite arching all the way through the sip.  The bite is less floral and more resinous and grassy.  The malts are on the sweeter side leaving a little caramel that when mixed with the heavy hops produce a wonderful sweet mixture, not unlike tasting a piece of pineapple.  At times the finishing hop bite can be so strong it borders on a slightly fishy aftertaste.  It's a small flaw in this otherwise fairly perfect beer.  Despite being at 7.1 and being very bitter, I think the drinkability is off the charts.  Thanks again to Great Divide and Stone.

Titan IPA: ****1/2

Santa Cruz Aleworks, California IPA

Wow, there's a surprise for you.  This beer poured almost all foam, much to my disappointment, as you can see in these photos.

Sort of ridiculous, I don't know whether I accidentally hit the bottle on it's way out or if it was just bottled under extreme pressure.  Took about five minutes to get this to calm down.

The aroma is surprisingly far more floral more reminiscent of Belgian styles than the piney hops I was expecting.  There's a little bit of fruit in there, but far more orange pulp than lemon or grapefruit rind since I'm getting sweet aromas.  The color is an orange bordering on golden, but it is a little cloudy which gives it a deeper hue.

The flavors in this beer are a little disappointing.  Maybe I was expecting an American IPA based on the bottle description, but this is clearly a Belgian IPA by the use of grain, yeast, and hops.  Flavors are very sweet up front with loads of carbonation.  This really gets too sweet for me and I'm reminded of a carbonated fruit juice.  Otherwise there isn't much at all up front, what few flavors there are feel muffled, or perhaps drowned, in an excess of water.  The taste does an about face towards the middle of the sip moving rather abruptly for the hop finish; too soon I'd say, as the fruity front end really dissipates into a highly watery mixture that doesn't do a good enough job of bolstering up the hops.  The hop finish is strong, but very lopsided since it feels like a thin layer of industrial styled bitterness offering very little in accompanying flavors.

Ultimately, this is far more of a Belgian IPA than an American one, and almost borders on a Saison.  But even after reclassification it doesn't do much for me since the malts don't impress any paticular urgency in their identity.  Somewhat surprising that a Santa Cruz beermaker would choose to go in this direction; with a name like California IPA, I'd expect American IPA flavors. Apologies to the makers, but I just didn't like this one.

California IPA: *1/2