Buckaroo of the Year
Holy Mountain Brewing Company - Interbay Brewery + Taproom

Cloudy unfiltered golden copper body. Grainy malt, touch of cereal, nice grapefruit and pine. Floral resinous bite on the backend is nice. Medium body and good carbonation. Nice APA with a little bit of both coasts represented with a dank wet hop flavor.

16oz can

Pours only a half finger of white head into my Willi. Retention is actually really nice, especially considering there wasn’t much head to start with. Initial lacing looks pretty good. Body is a cloudy golden yellow. Looks pretty nice so far.

A lot of citrus rind on the nose, orange marmalade, maybe some faint pineapple. Somewhat of a stale, maybe even sulfur-like aroma. Not a huge fan of citrus rind or big sweet orange flavors, so it’s not off to a great start, and the underlying “off” notes don’t help.

Flavor seems equally all over the place. It’s actually a little watery and bland to start out with, and after that the hops just have no sense of direction whatsoever, I can hardly even make out these flavors. Maybe some citrus, light underlying notes of diacetyl? It’s not infected, but I also can’t imagine it’s stale given it was canned only 3 weeks ago. I’m really not sure what happened here. Not very good.

Carbonation is medium-high. Body is pretty light. Somewhat dry, not much sweetness. Bitterness is medium, average for a pale. Pretty standard mouthfeel for a pale ale, if the flavor was better, this would actually matter.

While the mouthfeel checks out, the flavor hinders much of any real drinkability that this could have.

Appearance Turned out pretty nice. The head eventually dissipated, but put up a good fight, and the lacing was solid all the way down.

Not really sure what’s up with all these wild off flavors. It cleans up a little bit as it warms, but not enough. This is definitely the worst beer I’ve ever had from Holy Mountain, which is a bummer cause the art has to be top 5.