Moylans Hopsickle Imperial India Pale Ale

Brewed by Moylans Brewery & Restaurant
Style: Imperial/Double IPA
Novato, California USA

Tastingsession LCRBM08.
Golden colored brew. Hoppy, citric aroma. Very hoppy aroma, west-coast style. Some fruits, pine. Nice.

Bottle (LCRBM08): A bit hazy, deep golden coloured, small white foamy layer; solid mix of sweet pale malt and extremely aromatic, piney hops; very dry bitter flavour, medium to full bodied; lingering - that’s understood - dry bitter finish, balanced by a subtle sweetness. Great, great stuff..........

Bomber, pours a clear yellow-orange body with foamy, white head. Aroma of grapefruit and pine hops with hints of vanilla, citrus, and sugar. Flavor is all hops - strong citrus grapefruit and pine hop flavors dominate with a hint of caramel malt that does little to balance things out. Finish is bitter grapefruit and astringent with a bitter aspirin aftertaste. Smooth, slightly oily mouthfeel with medium body.

Bottle. Pours a slightly hazy, pale orange, with a thin, creamy off-white head, wall of lacing. Nose is positively exploding with hop aroma - huge sweet grapefruit and citrus offset a resiney pine underpinning. Taste is dominated by a big, bruising hop bitterness. Citrus, notably grapefruit and orange, hit the tongue first with a sweetness that is complemented by the sweet, caramel malt underpinning. A wave of sharp pine sweeps through, to be replaced by a lingering, dry bitterness, heavy but not quite overwhelming, that sits firmly on the palate. Rich sweetness from the malt never really goes away either. Alcohol never appears. While the bitterness is big, it’s neither harsh nor jarring. Mouthfeel is smooth and creamy, oily and slick. Really well done beer.

Amber orange pour with lacy white head. Nice grapefruit hop aroma. The flavor however, is tryingly bitter. At first I thought ’’nice, here is IPA that was not brewed with weak babies in mind’’, but the more I drank the more this started to taste like I was licking a jar of pepper with some pine needles and lemon juice thrown into it. Fine mouthfeel, but this beer is far to bitter to be enjoyable.

A whole lot of hoppy bidness going on here. You can tell there’s a nice cocktail of them but it’s very difficult to discern one from the other. It all blends together into a super tasty mix though, very citrusy and of course piney and smooth as velvet. Highly recommended.

Thanks cmillward! I really enjoyed this. The smell was very sweet with a lot of vanilla and sugary citrus. The taste was like vanilla wafers soaked in the finest spanish port. A little pine and east coast grapefruit rounded out the tastiness. A very good IPA.

Amber-orange, nice head, big, sticky, and puffy, hangs around quite a while. Nose is hoppy (not surprisingly), some grapefruit with lots of pine. Flavor is . . . I’d like to find a better phrase than "painfully astringent", but that’s about all I can come up with; this is hoppiness taken to an extreme, trying to suck as much bitterness out of the beer as possible. It’s a harsh mix of grapefruit and concentrated pine resin. Any residual sweetness dies at the swallow, all the malt backbone fleeing in terror at the overpowering harshness of the hops. It is, at least, not cloying and has a reasonably good palate, decently full without being sticky, but this is yet another case of bigger not necessarily being better; simply adding as much bitterness as possible to an IIPA does not mean it’s even vaguely good.