Great Waters Flying Circus Big Hop Ale

Brewed by Great Waters Brewing
Style: India Pale Ale (IPA)
St. Paul, Minnesota USA

A 64-oz Growler shared at JK’s Spring Gathering. Pours a roasted amber with a thick white head. Nice lacing to the glass. Aroma was sweet hops, and a lot of it. Other scents were grapefruit, toasted multi-grain, and lime rind. Taste shows soft malted barley, caramel and hop bitterness. Palate is a little gritty but a sweet aftertaste.

Cask. Copper color with a thick head. Large orange aroma. Big, floral hop taste with a healthy dosage of orange and Cascade. A little malt sweetness. Incredibly smooth. Tasty!

Like so many Great Waters beers, they get really close. This beer has an excellent, full hop aroma, very floral and some herbs. Sadly the flavor is very light, and quite the disappointment after the great aroma. The flavor is of hops and light bitterness. One of their better beers.

From the growler shared at a Minnesota party. Promising hop aroma. Average hop profile. I really like GW’s cask ales--I think this brewpub is under-rated in Minnesota. This growler didn’t reflect the best of their cask properties, but it’s also a relatively tame, normal amber-hued IPA--coming from someone who is always critical of hoppy beers.

Amber Color with Big White Head. Creamy Hopped Aroma. Nice Malted Foudnation..With Alot of English Hop Overlay. Soft Flavors Caressing Your Tongue, but Still Packing Some Alcohol. Clean Dry Aftertaste. Nice English IPA. Overall Notes...Feels a bit Chalky..and Some Subtle Notes of Caramel and Toast. Nice Ale!

Amber color. Very floral hop nose. Mellow hop body that let down after the nose. Not bad.

Amber, light head. Flavor a bit thin, plenty of hops in nose but not much flavor going on, pretty weak stuff.

On Cask at the Brewpub: Big orangey browned color with a hefty head of lightly tanned frothy thick foam on top. Keeps a good amount always present. Lots of lacing in big patchy sheeting and broad strings. Aroma is biscuity dry with a piney resin and slight lemony/grapefruity tug of pithy bitterness which grows intensely as it sits. Taste is bit strange, mainly due the Golden Promise malts that are used well beyond their means. The balance isn’t what I’d like to see out of an IPA. Dry, biscuity flavors abound, crystal and pale maltyness also seems overly evident. Woody, cardboard acsents grow as it sits and don’t develop to help the balance. Hop wise, its pretty beefy and dry, but seems hard to get much profile as it fights with the dry malt too much. The cardboardish flavors didn’t help either. Kinda leans more like a bigger version of an English ESB or pale than anything. Again, the dryness mixing with the semi high sweet promise malting, fevered hop bite, and cardboardish chalkishness surmount to a weird messy tone of dryness and strange bitterness. Body is medium and broadly dry with a grainy creamy centered froth of smashed up cereal and warm thick ice cream. I had a hard time with this one. Something about the flavors did not sit well with me. Balance wasn’t there either. A strange IPA at best.