Idaho 7 Dry-Hopped Double Cit-Mo
Shebeen Brewing Company

This is my first beer by Shebeen Brewing Co., a small brewery operating out of Wolcott, CT. I literally only bought this because the idea is straight-up stupid and audacious; I just had to see what they did with it and how it came out. I know what you're saying: "uhh, an Idaho 7 dry-hopped double IPA with Citra and Mosaic is audacious... how, exactly?" Well, it's not in the name of the beer so I couldn't put it when adding this to BA, but this was made with potato chips. It literally says "double IPA brewed with potato chips." Talk about burying the lede here, guys. Did they put chips in because the beer is hopped with Idaho 7 hops? Idaho is known for its potatoes, after all. I'm cautiously optimistic that this'll be fun, so let's see what's going on with it.

The pour here is really something. It's an opaque, incredibly intense orange color with a deeper-than-expected bent to its hue. When held up to light, this beer actually gets darker for some reason; it's pretty nuts. Wonder if the chips added extra haze or something. Wouldn't they be really oily? I really don't get why they did it, but hey, it got me to buy a can so... whatever. Anyway, the head is nice and fluffy, building up to about two fingers upon initial decanting and sinking down to a solid finger with rocky legs and great surface coverage. Not much lacing here, but maybe it'll show up as I sip.

The nose is pineapple, apricot, and plum with hints of tangerine and mango floating around. There's a ton of dark fruit and sticky almost-caramel like malt coming out, making me think this might end up being pretty heavy and dense on the palate. It definitely has a strong ethanol element to the scent as well. The stone fruit aspect of I7 comes out here quite prominently, but I do think the Citra does a good bit of work with the bright tropical citrus aspects here. I really still don't know how potato chips are gonna come into play here, and maybe they just won't. Who knows.

Ahh yeah, this is a big, boozy, sticky, sweet beer with a helping of oily hops (and maybe some of that oil is from the chips, I have no idea like I said) and some good flavors of pineapple, toffee, golden raisin, apricot, melon, and papaya. You're gonna really want to be okay with a darker fruit bent in your IPAs to enjoy this, but I find it at least slightly intriguing, even if it's not a great beer overall. It tastes a lot like fruit cake with an extra helping of syrupy pineapple on top or something. It's not something to crush and it's not going to win any awards at all, but for what it's worth, this was fun to try even though I'm not giving it a great score. Maybe I'm just big into whimsical stupid shit. On second thought, that's definitely at least part of the reason. It is what it is, I guess.