Scales
Stoneface Brewing Co.

Can from Roswell Beer Market Dec 2022

 

 

From a 16 oz. can dated 06/23/21. Sampled Aug 28, 2021.

It has that NEIPA look with its milky, hazy looking orange-amber appearance and cream colored head that laces as it fades.

The aroma emits vibrant orang, clementine, tangerine, and citrus characters with a lower profile cereal or bready graininess.

Medium to full mouthfeel. Chewy.

The taste is sweet with a bountiful character of orange juice and other citrus zest. Slightly bitter finish. Yup, Hopheads should enjoy this one.

Excellent NEIPA.
Light golden color with a 4F head in a Spielgelau IPA glass.
Aromas pine and citrus, some sweetness.
Very smooth MF.
Full cyro hop taste: very pronounced citrus and pine.
Definitely check it out.

 

From a 16oz can, dated 06/23/21. Served in a spiegelau-style IPA glass.

Pours a heavily hazy, semi-opaque dark, dull orange with a finger-plus of soft foam. Retention is OK, leaving a thick, sudsy cap and a gobby curtain of bubbly lacing.

Aroma is thick and malty with layers of orange juice, orange peel and pine.

Taste follows the nose, for better and worse - which is to say that the flavors are muted by the heavy malt body and all kind of muddy and muddled. Dominant flavor is orange juice but it tastes like the carton and it’s a little off and the pine is from a dusty sachet that’s been in the drawer too long. Like that. Bready, juicy-dank, with some oily orange peel and grapefruity bitterness at the end, but not much.

Feel is hefty-juicy, probably no more than medium bodied but feeling heavier due to over-gentle carbonation - there’s a little tongue-coating oily orange but there’s not enough carbonation to make it dance.

Overall, a bit of a disappointment, maybe because I had such high expectations for it. Think: an undercarbonated Stoneface IPA aged blended with prepackaged pulpfree orange juice past its best-by date - no, not really that bad, you know, just… not great.

 

This is a week old can of beer from Newington, NH-based darlings Stoneface. It's classed as a NEIPA by the brewery, but its strength definitely puts it in the double IPA category in my opinion. The can details that this features a "Cryo blend" of Citra and Mosaic hops, but looking into it a bit more on social media seems to indicate that it's not only Cryo versions of these varietals, but also the Incognito forms as well. All of this is pure dumb marketing in my opinion, but whatever; I have had some Cryo versions of hops I know pretty damn well that have felt nothing like the varietal in pellet form, and some that are extremely similar to the extent that telling people you used a different form of whatever varietal seems pointless, because at some point it seems to mostly be about maximizing extraction efficiency and doesn't really have anything to do with the consumer experience. But, enough about that. It's a Citra/Mosaic DIPA. How can it be bad? Seriously, I have faith in these guys to make a superb product with these two hops, no matter the form they're in.

The pour is an attractive, opaque orange color with a solid collar of foam building up atop the body of the beer. As it slowly sinks from two or so consistent fingers down to a thin, quarter-finger ring, it leaves behind some solid tiered lace with equally-nice legs that bespeak a fairly-aggressive hop treatment. As mentioned above, this doesn't seem like a really challenging beer for them to make, and I expect it to deliver just about everything that this kind of recipe can achieve in its most straightforward form.

The nose is complex and vibrant with a lot of raw citrus (pomelo, grapefruit zest, tangerine, and lime predominantly) with hints of dankness and some modest undercurrents of sweet malts to balance things out. It's not really overly complex or unusual, and I honestly think it could stress some of the more unique elements of Mosaic a bit more than it does, but the overarching character is lightly tropical and heavily citrus based with hints of the funky herbaceous qualities Mosaic can bring to the table.

Flavor is a bit more complex, as it seems to highlight the unusual Mosaic-ness more than the nose led me to believe it would. I appreciate some of the earthy, dank, resinous, and berry notes here, which come right off the tail-end of a wallop of punchy citrus qualities that drown the tongue immediately after the first few sips. Really nice balance here when it comes to malt vs. hops, especially as it gets a bit warmer (which happens quickly considering the heat-wave we're in the middle of in my area right now). These guys have a very good approach when it comes to hop saturation in their bigger IPAs, which allows them to stand up tall against some of the more-hyped breweries in New England, and the feel here is really no slouch either. Superb, clean flavors with a focus on hops and not yeast despite some light ester presence; it's more detail than main feature, though, and I think that's a lot of why I love their IPAs. They're all very distinct because they don't let their house yeast cloud things and muck it all up as a big anonymous mess. I am a bigger fan of their recent "Yeah, Okay Chief" DIPA (it's like this but a bit more experimental and successful at that experimentation to boot, which gives it the upper hand in my humble opinion), but you can't really go wrong here.