Beer Review: Odell IPA

By / June 6, 2008 /

Thanks to Bill Hepp over at New Belgium Brewery for heading over to the neighbors and giving us this mouthwatering review of a great classic from Odell Brewing Company. Drink the love.

Humulus Lupulus the grand, beautiful, utilitarian, hop plant- where would civilization be without you?

The bacterio-static properties naturally present in hop flowers add a natural preservative to beer. This was discovered quite a while ago by the English. Their patriotic civil servants worked up a mean thirst toiling under the hot Indian sun; pints of ale danced in their heat-stroked heads. It wasn’t long before they set sail on what would become the most epic beer run ever. Boy, did these guys have tenacity or what? Long story short, they discovered that the more hops in the beer and the higher the alcohol content the better it weathered the long sea voyage. We should all applaud the limeys for this fortuitous revelation which heralded the birth of the popular style now known as India Pale Ale.

Our good friends around the corner at Odell’s Brewing Company have recently whipped up an IPA that would slake the thirst of the most hardened servant to the crown. This IPA pours a thick, lofty head. It is a very light copper color. Of course, the first sniff registers a cornucopia of hops. This beer really smells terrific. Odell’s not only adds hops to the kettle, but they use a device known as a “hop back”. As the boiling wort leaves the kettle it passes through a strainer that is filled with whole hop flowers. This results in a very bright, fresh hop profile. They also add hops again at the end of fermentation. This deepens and expands the hop flavor. No less than seven varieties are used. There is some freshly cut grass, grapefruit, and what smells to me like a lodge pole pine forest after a summer rainstorm: earthy, piney, fresh, with an astringency that I have to say makes me think “clean”. It coats the tongue lusciously, and there is just the right amount of sweetness from the malt to balance the hops. It goes down all-too-easy, and at 7.0% abv, this could be a boon or a bane.

Hats off to Odell’s- working with a style that is inherently imbalanced, they have produced an IPA with poise and originality. It is easy to throw hops into boiling wort and beer. It is not easy to take an aggressively hopped beer style and combine the right varieties in just the right way without going overboard.

It makes me want to ride an elephant.