Øllen Om Bogen
Mikkeller ApS

The "Book of Beer" is a cloudy reddish orange with three fingers of puffy sudsy white head that partially breaks down to yield peaks and valleys and a smattering of lacing on the glass. Eventually flattens out to form a thin blanket of foam.

Aroma is dank grapefruit, blood orange, lime, lemon, gooseberry, starfruit. Fresh oily hops, quite catty truth be told. Redolent with Cascade, Citra, and maybe an even older hop or two. Dry biscuit-like malts lurk in the background.

Palate is extremely dry and hop-forward. Huge lime juice flavor is immediately apparent along with some pine resin, lemon grass, green melon rind, unripe currants, tomato leaf, and bone dry cracker-like malts. Don't come here looking for much in the way of caramel malt flavors. Wow. Fiercely parching and bitter yet retains a pleasing citrus top note throughout. One of the hoppier lagers I've sampled but don't expect the new wave of sweet tropical notes. This one is resinous, herbal, and full of tangy citrus rind first and foremost. Thin to medium bodied I suppose, with similarly middling carbonation. Chalky dry finish full of lime rind and green weeds. Peppery resins are making my mouth and nose tingle.

A prime example of the powerful end of the India pale lager sub-style spectrum. Hopped like an IPA and dry like a German pils. Perhaps overly dry but I gather that this is not supposed to be conventional. The hopping is frankly atavistic ... Hugely bitter, almost coarse. Brace yourself ... The wolf is wandering through the hedgerows.

330ml bottle. The name appears to translate to 'Book of Beer', which bears the scrutiny of the label imagery.

This beer pours a slightly hazy, pale golden copper hue, with three flabby fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and somewhat bubbly ecru head, which leaves some decent gear chain lace around the glass as it slowly recedes.

It smells of tart grapefruit and orange rind, dry biscuity, grainy pale malt, indistinct, and sort of dank tropical fruit and pine forest floor notes, underripe melon, and just a twinge of earthy yeast. The taste is quite bitter up front, a cavalcade of edgy citrus, melon, and foreign climes fruit dancing the Watusi on my side palate, aided and abetted by an equally stunned-seeming leafy, piney astringency, all over top a delinquent gritty, grainy, and crackery pale malt.

The carbonation is peppy enough in its plain Jane frothiness, the body a solid medium weight, and only partially smooth, that hop full-frontal resonating well past this point. It finishes quite dry, the now mostly blended hoppiness and plodding along grainy malt squeezing out any suggestions of sweetness.

Definitely an ode to the proto-style of the India Pale Lager - bigger and hoppier than the (slim) majority of IPAs that I have come across, and with the crisp maltiness of yer finer Bohemian pilseners. I don't quite know if Mikkeller is intimating here that they are adding to (or re-writing) some of the rules of the proverbial Book of Beer, but I say we at least hear them out on the matter!