Breach the Surface
Finback Brewery - Glendale
- From:
- Finback Brewery - Glendale
- New York, United States
- Style:
- American IPA
- ABV:
- 6.5%
- Score:
- +5 ratings needed
- Avg:
- 4.19 | pDev: 4.06%
- Ratings:
- | reviews: 1
- Status:
- Inactive
- Rated:
- Mar 19, 2020
- Added:
- Feb 13, 2020
- Wants:
- 0
- Gots:
- 0
NO SCORE
-
-
IPA dry hopped with Nelson, Waimea, and 007.
Recent ratings and reviews.
Reviewed by ichorNet from Massachusetts
4.01/5 rDev -4.3%
look: 4.75 | smell: 4.25 | taste: 3.75 | feel: 4 | overall: 4
4.01/5 rDev -4.3%
look: 4.75 | smell: 4.25 | taste: 3.75 | feel: 4 | overall: 4
Always fun to try these new Finback IPAs, as I've mentioned in reviews for them before. Cool hop combinations always interest me, and this one is no different. It's a regular strength NEIPA hopped with Nelson, Waimea, and 007.
The pour is an intensely-cloudy, essentially-opaque pale starchy yellow-orange color with a very generous, retentive head of pure white foam. Amazing, sticky lacing and fantastic legs on this one. If you enjoy hazy looking pale ales, this is absolutely one of the best in its class, appearance-wise, that I've poured recently. Even the surface coverage is immense... beautiful.
I'm very interested in how Nelson and Idaho 7/007 hops work together, so this was an intriguing beer to me right off the bat. Waimea is an NZ varietal that seems to behave kinda like a high-alpha West Coast US varietal, boasting strong citrus and pine aspects, so I'm thinking it will be focused on slightly-less than the other two unique hops in the recipe, but who knows? The initial nose is rife with melon, stone fruit, bright mango and papaya, resinous pine, orange juice, and a slight, interesting funk. Yeah, definitely feels 007-forward. There's a moderate note of the fruity white wine grape-like Nelson aspect here, but it feels like it's taking a slight backseat, which is fine with me. It usually can be kind of an overpowering quality, so the balance seems well-done here. Very hop-saturated for only 6.5%.
The flavor profile is melon, tangerine, yeast/oats/wheat, red berry, apricot, papaya, and mango with some touches of pine resin and tannins in the finish, rounding out everything with a lingering bitterness. It's all a little more homogeneous than I'd want, though, with a very consistent, doughy flavor that loses a lot of the complex hop character I detected in the nose. I honestly think this would probably benefit from being less hazy, as it seems that all of the suspended proteins/solids kind of muddle the nuanced hop elements. That said, it's still drinkable and pretty good, just doesn't measure up to some of Finback's better stuff.
Feb 15, 2020The pour is an intensely-cloudy, essentially-opaque pale starchy yellow-orange color with a very generous, retentive head of pure white foam. Amazing, sticky lacing and fantastic legs on this one. If you enjoy hazy looking pale ales, this is absolutely one of the best in its class, appearance-wise, that I've poured recently. Even the surface coverage is immense... beautiful.
I'm very interested in how Nelson and Idaho 7/007 hops work together, so this was an intriguing beer to me right off the bat. Waimea is an NZ varietal that seems to behave kinda like a high-alpha West Coast US varietal, boasting strong citrus and pine aspects, so I'm thinking it will be focused on slightly-less than the other two unique hops in the recipe, but who knows? The initial nose is rife with melon, stone fruit, bright mango and papaya, resinous pine, orange juice, and a slight, interesting funk. Yeah, definitely feels 007-forward. There's a moderate note of the fruity white wine grape-like Nelson aspect here, but it feels like it's taking a slight backseat, which is fine with me. It usually can be kind of an overpowering quality, so the balance seems well-done here. Very hop-saturated for only 6.5%.
The flavor profile is melon, tangerine, yeast/oats/wheat, red berry, apricot, papaya, and mango with some touches of pine resin and tannins in the finish, rounding out everything with a lingering bitterness. It's all a little more homogeneous than I'd want, though, with a very consistent, doughy flavor that loses a lot of the complex hop character I detected in the nose. I honestly think this would probably benefit from being less hazy, as it seems that all of the suspended proteins/solids kind of muddle the nuanced hop elements. That said, it's still drinkable and pretty good, just doesn't measure up to some of Finback's better stuff.
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