Tasting: March 12, 2016 Kitchen Sink IPA

It's interesting to think about the evolution of beer. If all you see is the end product, it may not occur to you. It happens on the commercial side, with filters, centrifuges, bright tanks, and various techniques such as dry hopping, etc. It for sure happens on the homebrew side, too, and this particular beer is a good example.

Early tasting notes, dated March 27, mere hours after kegging:

First tastings of kitchen sink IPA

The name kitchen sink really does a disservice to this beer. I set the beer at 30 psi yesterday afternoon around 4:30 PM. I just sampled it tonight around 10:15 PM. It is already pretty well carbonated. And wow what an explosion of flavor!

It is absolutely amazing how dry hopping will completely transform a beer. Yesterday the beer was somewhat translucent and golden amber and very fruity. Now it is an explosion of juice and super hazy. Even though this beer doesn't use wyeast 1318 yeast, which supposedly leads to a lot of haziness, I wonder if some of these famous northeast breweries are achieving this hazy look with tons of dry hopping.

In any event, I can tell this beer is going to be a real pleasure to drink. Tonight I also tried something I don't normally do with my dry hopped beers. I removed the beer and CO2 lines and set the keg on its side and rotated it several times in an effort to distribute the hop oils throughout the entire beer. I've heard that this [circulation of dry hops throughout the bright tank] is something that commercial breweries do.

Indeed, those early samples were quite murky. And tasted sweet, nearly to the point of cloying.

Fast forward a few weeks, and having drawn off a couple gallons from the keg here and there, the beer has brightened substantially and really hit its stride. 

It's hazy without being murky. It's very 'juicy,' and sort of reminds me of eating a jolly rancher. It sort of has this artificial fruit flavor, but in a good way. I think I just threw in so many hops that they just kind of combined forces into a random fruit conglomeration. Either way, it is extremely fruity, tropical, and a bit sweet, but thankfully bitter enough to rein in that sweetness. It is extremely fragrant as well.

Overall, I am very pleased with this sort of one-off shotgun-approach IPA. I probably will never brew it again, but it's up there with the best I've made.