Ithaca Double IPA

Brewed by Ithaca Beer Company
Style: Imperial/Double IPA
Ithaca, New York USA

Sweet malt and some slight hops.Pours a hazy orange with a medium white head.A lot more malt than hops in the flavor.Full mouthfeel with big malt and some slight hops in the finish.

Marshmellow aroma. It hides the alcohol very well in the aroma and flavor. Well balanced between sweet malt and bitter hops, but in a double IPA I don’t want balance as much as I do that hop burn. Still, a solid beer.

Pours a hazy orangish brown. Nice malty citrus aroma balance on the nose, with hints of roasted marshmallow. A little sweet for a DIPA, with considerable malt presence. Very little balance of bitter. Maybe the bottle was old, but the flavor was more of a bitter than a DIPA.

12 oz bottle. Amber orange and slightly cloudy with a white head. Aroma is quite subtle though. Hoppy, but ot overly fresh. Fruity and lightly spicy with peach/spice and black pepper over a full, sweet malt base. Peachy and doughy and comes across sort of greasy and fatty in the body. Sweet slightly toasty malts, but they mostly just provide fat sweetness with no subtlety at all. Quite hot and not terribly good.

Pours a cloudy copper orange with a slight and fading white head. Subdued citrus in the nose: orange, grapefruit. Slight malt balance and some tinges of alcohol are apparent. Taste is relatively simplistic, slight on the tongue and dominated by tangerine, pine sap. Biscuit malt presence balances things out. A good one, just not very complex in any redeeming way. As a semi-local (student), though, I am definitely pulling for you, Ithaca.

Poured a somewhat hazy amber with a fizzy/frothy white head. Aroma of pine, grapefruit, earthiness, a bit of alcohol and spearmint. Taste is strong and dry, with notes of some orange and grass, earthiness, lots of dry peppery alcohol, somewhat medicinal and some peppermint. Finish is long and dry with a bit of earthy, piney hop bitterness. I think the guys got the idea down, as I could imagine that this would be a decent first attempt at a double IPA. However, they’d have to refine it a bit, tone down the alcohol and medicinal tastes and up the hop complexity to make this truly exceptional.

Bottle. Cloudy orange color, minimal head left spotty lacing. Very jammy aroma of orange and apricot, with a touch of spruce and bubblegum. Flavor of fruit stripe gum, with a slightly bitter resiny/sappy grapefruit rind hop finish. Medium bodied with very little carbonation. Kind of like a bitter version of that Orangena sparkling juice drink. Very basic and simple for a 2IPA, lacking in the zesty complexity of some others.

12 oz bottle from Beers of the World in Rochester, NY (October 2006) consumed from a Corsendonk glass at a bit above fridge temperature, late November. Translucent bright orange with small bubbles in the body, a bit of off-white head dying quickly to a lasting ring....honey-vanilla-orange sweetness wafts up in the low-powered aroma, some light piney hops; overall it’s sweet, pleasant, little to no hoppy harshness, unmemorable.....pretty much the same can be said once tasted: a touch syrupy in the body, citric and acidic, moderately hoppy until the dry, bitter, somewhat cardboardy finish....low carbonation, decent full, unfiltered-seeming mouthfeel. Quite dull but very drinkable and with little alcohol apparent; profile is similar to Bells Hopslam but the latter is much, much better made.