By Greg B. I’ve been drinking a lot of dark, delicious beers lately, and figured it was time to shake things up a bit.  Fortunately, the Wine Source has a mixed 6pack you can make from all the leftover and forgotten beers that they need to move, so they can have space for new exciting and seasonal beers.  So it’s December, months away from summer and deep into the malt bomb style cold weather beers, and the mixed 6 pack shelf is full of IPAs… lucky me!  So I picked up a few which you can read about shortly and brought them home to get my fix of delicious hoppy brew.  Sure IPAs are best drunk (drank?) as soon as possible to get all those great volatile hop aromas and flavors intact and in full force, but these haven’t been sitting around too long… and at any rate, the hops really made their presence felt!

I poured this beer into a taller fluted glass I had handy (the bottle is a twist off, so don’t think you’re going to go around saving bottles from this brewery for your homebrewing adventures!).  The beer pours a delicious looking dark golden color with some aggressive carbonation, yielding a large, 2 fingers of white foamy head that recedes kind of quickly but is never gone, due to the rapid refreshment from the CO2 escaping from the liquid!  The hop aroma is powerful, citrus but focusing on the pine aromas.  The flavor is very similar to the aroma, with flavors of resinous pine followed with a citrus finish.  The beer has enough of a malt structure to sustain the bitterness from the hops in a very pleasant manner, though it is not too malty, allowing this beer to remain very refreshingly delicious.  I look forward to drinking a few of these in the summertime! 3.0/5, 6.8%abv