Area 52 Flamingopher IPA
Phillips Brewing & Malting Co.

 

 

 

Extracted from my Phillips Hop Box with great joy. This is lighter in character, with melon and citrus in abundance. The hops are on the "perfume" side of things, not terrible, but not my ideal in an IPA. Overall, a pleasant enough beer, to be sure.

 

Tasting notes: Getting a lot of lime initially. Red grapefruit comes later. Melon rind. Rather dry and almost perfumy. Tastes like a Kiwi hop to me, one of the more herbal and citrusy varietals. Little overt tropical character. Aroma is sweeter than the palate. Smooth crisp bitterness. Finish is recalling unsweetened orange soda. Enjoyable enough if not quite living up to the experimental billing. Almost too clean.

341ml bottle, part of one of the recent incarnations of the Phillips Hopbox - this 'graduate' of the purported Hop Development Lab is denoted as 'IPA #7739', and nothing more, y'hear?

This beer pours a clear, pale golden yellow colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, yet tightly foamy, and faintly bubbly off-white head, which leaves some complex chunky webbed and cloudy lace around the glass as things genially subside.

It smells of somewhat dank pine resin, muddled orange and maybe red grapefruit citrus rinds, equally fuzzy tropical melon notes, obfuscated semi-sweet grainy pale malt, perhaps a touch of further caramel sweetness, a suggestion of the brewery's house yeast, and subtle alcohol astringencies. The taste is bready, doughy pale and caramel malts, more resinous than dank pine needles, a consistent orange, grapefruit, and melon fruitiness, ethereal (thankfully) yeast, and more earthy, leafy, floral, and slightly perfumed hops.

The bubbles are plain in their equally supportive and tongue-tingling frothiness, the body a solid middleweight, and too rife with various otherwise agreeable hop esters to be deemed particularly smooth. It finishes trending dry, the hops of recent mouthfeel interference still doing what they do, oh so well.

There have been more than a few of these 'unspecified in their hop schedule' IPAs from Phillips in the past year or two, and at least a couple of them have gone full production (amateur to professional promotion so quickly, I know!) of late. Anyways, it seems like the experimental hop here has at the very least a bit of ancestral connection to the melon-y Belma varietal - 'cause that's the only delta I'm getting with this one.