Kommenter Beer Barrel: Calling All Hops

I remember very clearly, seven years or so ago, a time when the cutting edge of IPA brewing methods seemed to involve cramming as many hop cones as you could into a boiler of wort. Later, breweries would become bored with merely filling the boilers to overflowing with hops, and started cramming the hop cones into the fermenters, also, and dry-hopping was born. But even before the advent of widespread dry-hopping, the IPA scene was a wild-ass place, full of lunatics putting out beers with names like Ruination and Palate Wrecker that rated in the triple digits in a measure called International Bitterness Units, which didn’t really tell you how bitter a beer was actually going to taste but was a pretty good measure of how many hops had been crammed into it. A brewery in Denmark made an IPA that “theoretically” had 1000 IBUs, which is dumb because no one can taste more than about 110 unless, maybe, they’re buttchugging. This towering achievement of stupidity in brewing was not surpassed until last year, when a brewery in Britain released a beer at 140 proof just to show it could be done.

Of late, though, brewers of IPA have moved away from sheer unfathomable bitterness and into beers designed to highlight the unique and increasingly diverse flavors of specific hops. Sierra Nevada was an early innovator here with Torpedo IPA, a showcase for the then-new Citra hop. But it’s Mosaic, a daughter of Citra, with its almost unbelievably lush tropical fruit flavor, that’s really kicked this evolution into overdrive. Nationally, Deschutes Brewing put out a Mosaic-Citra IPA a couple of years back to thunderous applause. Fresh Squeezed, an IPA you’d swear is some kind of ridiculous fruit beer even though there’s not even one fresh grapefruit or mango put into it, was a revelation to me personally and, it turns out, a precursor to a whole new breed of IPA. To give a brief rundown of the story since:

The best-rated IPA in my entire home state of Texas is Lone Pint Yellow Rose, a single-hop Mosaic IPA best described as “Fresh Squeezed, but without any of the things that don’t make it perfect.” Breweries across the country are rolling out IPAs with Mosaic, because I swear to God, this hop is like cheating at IPA. But it’s not just one hop. Brewers are making beer with all-New Zealand hops, plants with names like Rakau that are somehow delivering passionfruit and black pepper in the same package. Oskar Blues made an IPA with nothing but Australian hops and just called it “IPA.” Stone Brewing has bought fully into the revolution, reformulating two of its classics, Pale Ale and (much more shockingly) the paradigmatic IBU-arms-race IPA, Ruination. The former’s now focused around potential next-big-thing Mandarina Bavaria. The latter now incorporates Citra and the still-underused Azacca. Closer to my home, Real Ale Brewing of Blanco, TX has done the same, turning its venerable Full Moon Rye Pale Ale into a full-fledged IPA featuring Citra hops.

I’m not here to talk about any of those beers, even though you should drink them all. Boulevard’s The Calling IPA is a little bit old school, a little bit new school. The hop bill is a hell of a roll call, with American classics Cascade, Amarillo and Simcoe meeting trendy newcomers like, yes, Mosaic, but also Equinox and Bravo, not to mention recent Australian inventions Topaz and Galaxy. Against this IPA’s sweeter-than-typical malt backdrop, they show off a range of flavors from pine to peach without coming off as muddled or scattered. The beer pours golden and hazily translucent, and the head leaves such a nice lacing that you can tell JR Smith’s never been anywhere near it. At 8.5% ABV, The Calling straddles the line between regular IPA and double IPA, and is best suited for activities like putting beer into your face.

tl;dr: IPA’s changin’, y’all. If you hate beers that give you bitter beer face, you’ll probably be able to tolerate this one. If you swear by the old school hop bombs, this is a great introduction to a whole new dimension of hoppiness. If you just like things that taste good, buy this, buy it now.

Grade: Of course you can have IPA for breakfast.

lady snow says: This is definitely a maltier IPA. It reminds me a little of scotch for some reason. I’m not sure why. Like if you took the booziness, and the smoke, out of scotch, and just had that underlying flavor.

make it snow says: I always get the most unconventional beer takes from you. But I’ll be a son of a bitch if you’re not right. It’s like this combination of hops somehow mimics the flavor notes you get from good whisky.

make it snow is an alot of beer who has drunk at least 2000 unique beers in his life. He drank two bottles of The Calling last night and another this morning. At press time he is yelling at Northwestern’s football team. Buy him a beer on the PayPals.