The beers that could use some work, though, were styles that are decidedly less trendy. The hops were not particularly well integrated, sticking out as grassy and a bit medicinal. The cherry and lemon stood out, giving it an up-front sweetness with a clean tart finish (a dining companion commented that it tasted like Flintstones vitamins). The Rollcall fruit sour IPA ($6/pint, $2.75/taster) bridged the two worlds, but leaned more heavily on the sour side. It had nice body and structure, but not a lot of funky complexity. Here it was strawberry at the fore, rich and sweet up front, finishing with a long lingering acetic burn that built as it warmed. More to our taste was the Pink Guava Massacre ($6/10-ounce tulip, $2.75/taster), a Berliner Weisse tailored for summer afternoons on the patio, loaded with flavors of, well, Pink Guava, featuring a soft finish with only a light tartness, The Follemont Passionee ($7.50/10-ounce tulip, $3.50/taster), a collaboration with Chicago’s Une Annee and the only open-fermented sour, was more aggressively sour. Ecto-coolest ($6/pint, $2/taster) edges toward citrusy sweetness and comes out the color of a Bud Light on St. Their kettle-soured beers tended toward the straightforward, uniformly clean, balanced, and drinkable. It was noticeably more pale and a good degree hazier than Sticky Juice, but the lighter sweetness and alcohol made it decidedly more gulpable, pushing up mango and faintly catty notes in the hops. Neon ($6/pint, $2/5-ounce taster), a single IPA, boasts the same two hops as Sticky Juice (Mosaic and Citra) and might have actually been our favorite of the IPAs we tried. One night we got a pour from what must have been the bottom of the keg, as an excess of residual hop matter gave the beer a sickly, greenish tinge and led to a bit of throat burn in the finish. Make the Galaxy Hazy Again ($6.50/10-ounce tulip, $3.50/taster) dials up the alcohol and the turbidity, which leads to a bit more perception of dryness and pithy bitterness on the finish. There’s a little bit of grassy note that, particularly on the nose, smells remarkably like marijuana. It features a smooth, medium body with a slightly chalky finish and huge notes of ripe stone fruit and blueberry. Sticky Juice ($6/10-ounce tulip, $3.50/taster), a double IPA, is an easy choice if you want to know what the fuss is about, and one of the better beers we tasted at Barn Town. You’ll routinely find the Datebook Diners’ fridge full of Toppling Goliath, Trillium and other breweries that dabble in these beers, which feature explosive hops and a correspondingly huge aroma and flavor that tend toward citrus and tropical fruit, typically with little to no bitterness. Barn Town has fully embraced the hazy, New England-style IPA craze.
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