There was a terrible time in my life, in which I didn’t particularly like big kick ass beers, I drank malt liquor, I drank rolling rock and horrible, horrible shit. I call this time anywhere between the ages of 17-18. When a friend finally got a fake ID, and we had carte blanche reign over the beer isle, I bought a bottle of Stone’s Arrogant Bastard, and a six-pack of Sierra Nevada. I could hardly manage to drink the Arrogant Bastard, the hoppiness was overpowering, even the Sierra Nevada was far from enjoyable to me…
However time heals all wounds, or in this case evolves all palates, and I began to explore the more intense beers not simply because I thought it would make me look like a bad ass (though it is a nice side effect), but out of a sincere lust for something of substance, something with a voice. The India Pale Ale was the first beer style that yelled loud enough for me to pick it out of a crowed. So like a newly born, blind kangaroo baby, I clung to it as though it were my mother’s fur and crawled instinctively into its nurturing marsupial pouch.
The side effect of my early and often IPA abuse is that I’ve become extremely accustom to the flavor profiles they present. Big hops, tons of bitter lovely flavor and a deliciously tangy lingering aftertaste. While I’m no where near being tired of it, I do feel that it takes a good deal more uniqueness to truly rouse me than it did when I made the switch from Mickey’s Grenades to real beer.
Which brings me at last to the beer this review is supposedly reviewing… Karl Strauss’ Tower 10 IPA. This is a lovely, lovely beer. Appropriately bitter, but not so much that it flattens out the flavor profile. Slightly citrus-y, but not so much that it becomes gimmicky. The aftertaste comes on strong and coats the mouth with a lingering bitterness. It’s balanced, above all else, and engenders love and respect because of this.
Often I think the IPA genre becomes a brewery’s intimidation beer. The brew they produced with maximum hops, full flavored, high percentage, full on attitude, in an attempt to garner some street-cred. While this does produce some truly impressive over-the-top beers, I fear that it sells the IPA style short, and is increasingly pushing it towards homogenization. Tower 10 avoids this, both in marketing that is delightfully lacking “edginess” and in a taste that satisfies the lust for hops, without sacrificing multidimensional flavor in the process.
Interestingly Tower 10 didn’t shake me from my IPA desensitization by blowing me away with it’s intensity, nor did it get my attention by going to extremes in the addition of adjunct flavorings like orange peel or something. Instead it simply followed the old creed “Everything in Moderation” and in doing so it delivers a wonderfully balanced IPA experience.
(Did Ben Franklin really coin “Everything in Moderation”? I feel like every witty quote from American History is either attributed to him or Mark Twain, often erroneously, so why bother siting the source anymore. Right?)
