Yesterday’s Sunset
Finback Brewery - Glendale

 

 

fiire

 

I have had many Finback beers and many Mikkeller beers, but I've never had a collab beer between the two! This is a cherry-pineapple IPA hopped with Citra, Belma and Mosaic. It clocks in at 7.2% and was canned 12 days ago on 8/6/18! Fresh, dry-hopped, fruit forward IPA from two of the most unique, sought-after brewing operations currently going... can it get better?!

This pours a lot like grapefruit juice, with a hazy, pretty-much-opaque body bearing a deep mid-amber hue. The head is retentive but smallish, measuring about a finger-and-a-half at its highest point. Lace and legs are quite solid, however, with nice cobweb patterns of foam forming around the upper edges of my glass as the initial foam dissipates. Nice stuff!

The nose seems to lean heavily on the melon-like notes of Belma to balance the acidity from the pineapple. At first, this seems a little one-dimensional, but I do start to pick up some interesting grassy notes, toasted coconut and light berry here and there. I'm missing the cherry element almost entirely, though, which is a bit disconcerting. Granted, cherries can really occupy a lot of different spaces in beer (sweet, sour, tart and even kind of earthy), but I don't really get much of anything that they could potentially offer here. There's a slight sniff of something like lactose bringing out a creamy note, but I'm not sure if that's just some vestigial hop-related element, yeast, or something else entirely. Weird. Not bad, but not very convincing.

The flavor profile is like a cherry-flavored novelty ice cream bar... I get a huge hit of pitted sweet cherries with some notes of apricot, melon and pine resin from the remaining hop additions. The Mosaic hops in particular are doing some crazy work backing up the honeydew and berry notes from the Belma addition here, so I have to give props to the brewers for their balancing act in this regard. This could easily fall into the realm of unbalanced fruit IPA were it not for the immense hop additions keeping things in check.

The feel is somewhat more in the realm of "smoothie IPA" than expected; perhaps a little more than I'm comfortable with. Given that this beer was not advertised as having anything to do with that trend, I am a little put-off by its apparent smoothness. Perhaps it is intentionally under-attenuated or something, but the sweet lingering flavor here is a negative. I either want these new-school IPAs with unusual elements (be they fruit, bizarre hop schedules/varietals, other adjuncts, etc.) to go all-in on the dry end of the spectrum or fully embrace being some kind of strange freeze-pop/alcoholic-beverage hybrid... and this does neither, just kind of waffling about between these elements. Choose a side! There is no room for weakness in the weird-ass modern IPA scene! Would likely not revisit this one.

This is a collaboration with Mikkeller; IPA with cherry and pineapple (which shows up more in the nose than mouth), dry hopped with Citra, Belma, and Mosaic; another very good hazy IPA from Finback