Commentist Beer Barrel: Shoot to Thrill

Good afternoon, beer coin-a-suers. [DFO’s] resident drunk beer reviewer, Make It Snow, is an a lot of something else right now apparently, and as BFC pointed out last week, guest posts are a happenin’. I am your Low Commander of the Super Soldiers, and this week you are stuck with ME!

It has been a while since an IPA has found its way into the Barrel, so I decided to change that this week with a review of one of up and coming Beachwood BBQ & Brewing’s beers. Located right in the heart of downtown Long Beach, I have not yet made the pilgrimage North to peruse their boozey wares, but that will likely be changing soon. I have been rather impressed with their bottle selections so far, all of which I have had being IPAs, so I figured why break that trend now? It also gives me an excuse to use one of my fancy IPA glasses that I got for Xmas last year.

Thrillseeker is a double dry-hopped IPA that sits at 7.1% ABV and over 100 IBUs. The initial dry-hop contains Chinook, Summit, Centennial, and Simcoe, and the second doubles down on the Simcoe and Chinook. That’s a lotta hops! My bottle had a date code of 5/23/17, and it’s hard to get much fresher than that. It pours a fairly light orange and the head maintains a good half inch of foam after coming down a little. The smell is powerfully hoppy with a kick of citrus, which is about exactly what I was expecting with this beer. My initial sip started very clean; you get all the taste of the sweet malts and tropical citrus up front, before quickly giving way to a mild bitter earthiness on the back of the tongue. And let me tell you, that bitter bite isn’t going anywhere for a while. Each sip afterwards builds upon it, and even if you take a break for a minute or two, you’re going to have that lingering in the back of your mouth.

I let this beer warm up a bit to see how it would change, and my did it. After a good 30-45 minutes, this thing became the definition of a hop bomb. That lingering backend bitterness changed to a kick in the teeth that encompassed my entire mouth, and I couldn’t taste any other damn thing. If that’s what you’re going for, have at it, but this quickly went back in my fridge for a bit to round out those sharp edges.

Overall, it’s a pretty tasty IPA with a not overpowering bitter bite, but I didn’t find it particularly special among a lot of the other offerings available today. If I happened to find it on tap anywhere, it certainly would be a go-to, but I wouldn’t necessarily be tracking this down. That being said, it is a solid addition to the quality line up of Beachwood’s growing selections and if you happen to find something by them, I sincerely doubt that you would be disappointed.

Low Commander of the Super Soldiers is a somewhat of beer and drank a can of Stone Ripper in the shower before this 22 oz of Beachwood Thrillseeker. He enjoys talking in the third-person a little bit too much, and drank the majority of this Thrillseeker while finally completing Mass Effect: Andromeda. He recommends the beer, not the game.