Samuel Adams LongShot Double IPA

Brewed by Boston Beer Company
Style: Imperial/Double IPA
Boston, Massachusetts USA

Nice aroma of piney and floral hops. The appearnace is a red/amber color, true to the style. Hazy appearance, and a white head. The flavor is earthy, bready, malty, flowers. A nice complex mix of hops and malts. Some toffee comes in after a few seconds. The finish is floral hops, with a coating of toffee malt sweetness. The finsh is probably the best part. Thick, sticky mouthfeel. Excellent. Sam Adams is acting like they are doing these independent brewers a favor by including them in this program. But actually, they should hire the guy who made this beer to show them how great quality beer is made.

Tallahassee, Fl. - Market Square Liquors - 12 oz bottle - part of the Longshot Homebrew mixer. Fresh floral spruce-floral bouquet. Murky dark orange pour with a nice soft white sticky head. Good bitter sweet flavor with lots of sticky grapefruit bitterneness with some nectarine like fruitiness thrown in the back end. Thick rich mouthfeel - the best of the mixer - solid.

Bottle, courtesy Ibrew2or3. Cloudy peachy copper pour, thick white lacing and a bubbly head. Big piney hops in the nose, tons of citrus, some vanilla. Piney flavors, sweet, sticky malts, and full of grain. Full-bodied, sticky on the palate.

A solid, but not aggressive pour produces a six finger thick, light amber tinged, tan colored head. The beer is quite hazy, and in fact had a ton of wispy sediment at the bottom of the bottle. The beer is red amber color that shows an lightly hazed, but not opaque, copper amber color. The aroma is quite hoppy but has a bit of a green, vegetal edge to it. Otherwise though it is dominated by fruity hop notes of lychee, sweet grapefruit and intense tangerine as well as an herbal, sort of hemp oil like note that is fairly light, or at least the up front fruitiness makes it harder to notice. Definitely intensely hoppy like a good Double IPA should be, but somehow it seems a little dirty in its hop character, though this is not necessarily a bad thing in a hoppy beer.

I breathe in as I take my first sip and I get an intense, dank, herbal, hemp-oil note that lingers on the tongue and gets fairly intense in the lingering finish. The finish also has a biting bitterness (though the bitterness in this beer is actually on the low side for a insanely hopped beer) and a gritty astringent hop leaf note. This has a nice hop fruitiness as well, though it ultimately is drowned out by the aggressive finish, with notes of tangerine, tropical fruit lychee and kumquat peel. Other hop notes of menthol and pine join the hemp-oil note. The body is light enough that this hits the quaffability that I like to see in the style, though the hops are a bit harsh to be truly quaffable.

While on the smooth side, this definitely is quite a dank, dirty Double IPA. This doesn’t have nearly the intense hop balance of Pliny the Elder, but it is still a solid, incredibly inexpensive, hop fix for the hop head.

Kind of a cool color, lots of carmel malt sweetness but a dry finish. Not a normal west cost IIPA nose. Carmel / oxadized feel to it. Trying to not knock a corprate way to make an IIPA but it’s all that comes to mind. Mid west sweetness carmel big rich mid, no finish. A bit bitter. Thick mouthfeel. No nose but the carmel but for an IIPA that’s Ok. If this was under $6 for a 6 pack great, but $10 for 6 beers, of which you only get 2 of what you want to try I don’t like. Bundeling is no good. Still made well. But drinking after a Pliny Elder, this seems like an alien....

Poured hazy golden amber, floral, piney, citrus, spicey, caramel, little resin, little malty.

OK, I have been critical about plastering the faces of the winners all over the bottle. In this case, however, Dude enhances the brew by giving me confidence from the outset - this guy looks like he’s brewed a few and downed a few (perhaps a couple very recently.) The beer itself is oak colored and misty. The aroma was lighter than I would have thought, but there’s some orange/tangerine over a very traditional pale ale yeast. Bare-knuckle hopping along with alcohol bitterness mean that the sweetness takes a bit of a back seat. Just across the line towards being heavy. There were some off, sulphurous flavors here and there in the high palate, but overall this was a pretty sophisticated brew.

Didn’t expect to say this without trying the Utopias, but I am truly impressed by Sam Adams. Citrus and fruity hops dominate the profile and the resiny oils give it a great mouthfeel. The menagerie of hops create a fantastic and unique flavor. It is lacking in malt balance, but that’s just how I like ’em. Mike McDole, I have never met you, but one taste and I can tell you are the man! Thanks for this one, and thank you Sam Adams for not bitching out on brewing (and acquiring the hops for) this massive and awesome beer.