Trifecta
Parallel 49 Brewing Company

Lighter, slight hoppy, slight wheatiness, very pleasant, nothing fancy just pleasant. Like a sunset. Not a gorgeous Hawaiian sunset but a sunset nonetheless.

 

 

 

Review from notes. LCBO purchase for around $3.25 CDN.

Appearance - brilliant hazy yellow colour with hues of gold. Two plus fingers of bold white head on top. Mountainous head in that it develops and forms crevasses and rocky passes. Great retention and lacing.

Smell - earthy and slightly piney west coast hops. Wheat and citrus fruit also make an appearance. Clove and banana makes the smallest of appearances.

Taste - Touch of banana, bubblegum, clove, wheat, citrus and west coast hops. Really well balanced too. Same flavor profile although diluted and simplified as Tap 5 from Schneider Weisse.

Mouthfeel - smooth, creamy medium-light bodied with good carbonation. Drinks with a certain richness that a good hefeweizen or hopfenweizen should have.

Overall - Thebest I've had from these guys drinks like a lower ABV, slightly spritzier Tap 5 from Schneider weisse, which happens to be one of my favorite beers of all time.

Can: pours a pale cloudy yellow with a massive billowy cap....spicy-fruity esters with juicy hop notes and a base of dusty malts....flavor is lightly complex with with fruity spicy esters mixing with hop pine-citrus-floral tones on a lush mouthfeel, dry dusty biscuity and fruity hoppy in the finish....like an IPA crossed with a heffeweizen....if this is what the brewer was going for he hit the mark.

July 3 2019

473 mL can from the LCBO; dated Mar 27 2019 and served slightly chilled. Glad to see there's still a slow trickle of P49 beers showing up in Ontario: variety is the spice of life, after all, and only a handful of BC brewers seem willing to bother these days.

Pours a cloudy golden-yellow colour, topped with nearly an inch of foamy, soapy white head that falls apart within the next several minutes. A messy coat of delicate lace is left in its wake, with a wide collar of froth being the eventual leftovers; a fine-looking weisse. It smells quite floral, with potent notes of melon, banana and lemon also coming through clearly. Lesser hints of stone fruit, orange, clove spice and wheaty, bready pale malt sweetness become more noticeable as it warms.

Its profile is moderately fruity, but well-grounded in a firm foundation of grainy, bready pale malts and doughy sweetness, as well as a fair bit of ripe banana flavour. The titular trifecta of hops imparts flavours of melon, tangerine, lemon and white grape at first, then taking on more of a floral tone towards the back end. That's where the clove spiciness from the German yeast starts to creep up on the taste buds, supported by more lime-y citrus pith, banana and melon; hints of resiny, earthy hop bitterness persist into a yeasty aftertaste with some lingering malt sweetness. Medium in body, with similarly average carbonation levels that provide a gentle prickliness; a little more substantial in terms of mouthfeel than most weisses, but most hopheads should find this reasonably sessionable.

Final Grade: 3.91, a B+. Parallel 49's Trifecta wasn't bad at all - it's a serviceable hopfenweisse that I liked, but didn't quite love. Impressively flavourful for only 5%, and basically a hop bomb, for lack of a better term - I'm not a big fan of the resultant hop profile, but it was worth it to try. The sort of brew I might return to on a whim, if I were in the mood for this sort of niche beer.

 

Crack! The lid bent to my will and loosened its grip. Its last attempt at vengeance, to scrape my fingers with its spiky teeth, was foiled by my swift movement. The lid trembled on the kitchen counter before it finally succumbed to its immobile end. A soft pillar of steam escaped the bottle and I took a whiff. The inviting scent of yeast promised that this beer would be utterly delicious.
As I poured the dark orange liquid into my glass, I witnessed the murky flood of flavour circling in the container. It formed a fluffy foam at the top, rising like a freshly baked french pastry. But like that pastry, it collapsed within seconds, the foam no longer crowning the top of my glass and leaving only a strip of white at the edge of the cloudy beer. I raised my glass, eager with anticipation for that bitter flavour, and sloshed the fluid beyond my lips. The scent kept its promise when it announced the presence of yeast and hops. My tongue was grazed by the fingers of familiar hefeweizen followed by a soft touch of bitter at the end of its journey down my throat. But there was something else, tip-toeing along, desperately trying to stay concealed yet unable to leave no tracks behind. A hint of tropical fruit, subtle but present, tried to keep up with its friends hefe and hop. That was it, I thought. That was the ultimate trifecta of beer.
I looked at the lid, lying motionless on my kitchen counter. The bend in its center, a visible scar from its struggle against my metal hinge, reminded me of the purpose the lid served and it filled me with anger. "How dare you", I said out loud. "How freaking dare you try to keep this from me." I finished the rest of the beer, the only comfort left inside my empty kitchen.

 

 

 

650ml bottle - a 'Hopfen Weisse', wherein they added a trifecta of hops (presumably 3 different varietals) to a Hefeweizen.

This beer pours a murky, medium apricot yellow colour, with three fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and bubbly eggshell white head, which leaves some decent broken webbed lace around the glass as it quickly blows off.

It smells of soggy banana chips, banana bubblegum, banana Peeps, grainy and bready pale malt, a touch of earthy yeastiness, and some plain musty, weedy, and floral green hop bitters. The taste is gritty and grainy cereal malt, banana pudding, dried banana peel, a muddled earthy spiciness, estery yeast, and more laid-back leafy, musty, and floral hoppiness.

The carbonation is average in its palate-pinging frothiness, the body a solid middleweight, and sort of smooth, as the yeast and spice kind of combine to make a bit of ado here. It finishes off-dry, but not by all that much, with the banana finally fading amongst the lingering spice and hop esters.

Overall - well, I've come across a few offerings of late that employ the whole 'B-A-N-A-N-A-S' trope in their marketing, and have admittedly moaned about it. To flip sides, I would not have been put off if they had used it for this one, because banana. Otherwise, this is a serviceable hoppy Hefe, but that's not what you're going to remember, is it?