Ithaca Sour Flower Power

Brewed by Ithaca Beer Company
Style: India Pale Ale (IPA)
Ithaca, New York USA

[BCTC 09] Hazy dark gold with a medium sized, off white head that left nice lacing on the glass. Aroma of horsey brett, vanilla, floral hops, citrus fruits, pine, and toast. Taste of citrus, pine, grapefruit, toasted malts, vanilla, and a bitter, hoppy finish.

A orange pour with creamy white head and lace. Sweet malt with a light breadiness. Flavor is sweet malt backbone followed by a nice subtle finishing bitter. A nice medium bodied beer with good carbonation. Nice beer all round.

In short: IPA bitterness meets funky sourness in this confused but entertaining beer.
How: Tap at Boston Extreme Beer Fest 2009
The look: Cloudy orangey blonde body topped by a small off-white head
In long: A weird best. The funky hoppy nose is pretty out-there. Hard to describe. Flavour elements include bready malts, citrus fruits, piney hops, funky sourness, honey/caramel, grapefruits, floral notes, lots of cedar. Dry finish. It’s pretty worthless to list flavour elements here. This beer attempts to blend the bitterness of a American IPA, the wild sourness of the west-coast brews and a bretty funkiness. And it pretty much succeeds. However on paper it sounds like the best beer ever but drinking it is another story. This is a clash of flavours/styles more than a cohesive extravaganza. I’ll stick to the Hitachino Classic Ale when I want an IPA-ish beer on the wild side. The foundation is good and this is a very interesting but not entirely successful experiment that gets many points for being entertaining, like watching a Slayer perform a dance number on their own music.

The brett doesn’t add quite enough sourness for it to break through the hops. It’s just a pretty-good IPA plus some bitterness.