Black IPA - Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing

LittleDon

Texas

3.4/5  rDev -12.1%
look: 4 | smell: 4 | taste: 3 | feel: 3.5 | overall: 3.5

A pint at the Santa Cruz Mountain taproom on 10/6/11.

Wet hopped with Cascade. Dark, rich head with some lace. Roasted malt aroma, almost porter like. Medium high carbonation and medium body. Taste is more porter like also, light coffee, but on the diluted side. Some bitterness in the middle and end, but less than nearly all other IPAs I've had.

Serving type: on-tap

10-07-2011 23:37:30 | More by LittleDon

Offa

California

4.33/5  rDev +11.9%
look: 4 | smell: 4 | taste: 4.5 | feel: 4 | overall: 4.5

This is a very tasty, well-rounded, balanced beer, but to me it seems essentially like a solid porter.

Essentially black, it has a creamy tan head very slowly shrinking to a thin top that lingers before thinning to a thin ring. It leaves some pretty nice lace.

Aroma is caramel, hints of charcoal, toast, wood.

Taste is smooth, creamy of character and feel,, light winey prune and plum, some lightly caramelised dark fruit, some bitter chocolate, a leafy-woody-peppery spicey bitterness, light and balancing the sweetness nicely. It is neither bitter nor sweet, with the two balancing, and with perhaps some faintly more hoppy elements than one might find in a porter, but not much.

I find it a very good, well-rounded, characterful, and highly drinkable beer, but essentially a porter or stout. This is, though, simply another example of what I perceive to be a problem with some of the supposedly "new" styles people have been coming up with in the last couple years or so, which to me simply seem to be new names for old styles or, at most slight variations on styles that already exist and really no different from some examples of those already existing styles. So often beer styles overlap, and inherent problem with trying to categorise something that can be so varied and subjective. The more "categories" or "styles" one throws in just makes more overlaps of styles, more blurring, etc., and is really just a nit-picking attempt to more narrowly define beers that already fit quite fine into other categories, or perhaps a conceited claim to be creating a "new" style that isn't really all that original. Perhaps this rant belongs in the fora, but it seems to be apropos here at the moment.

Serving type: on-tap

09-15-2010 05:31:46 | More by Offa