Obliteration VI
Midnight Sun Brewing Co.

 

 

 

burnt amber was then poured into the glass. Tons of floaties in this one, which does not really turn me off to it. A nice two inch layer of foam then rose up over it and took over over, settling gently into a thin layer of lace across the top which hung around for a good long while. Some carbonation as well as some decent side glass lace were present as well.

The aroma was a mixture of resin filled piney hops, with a touch of earthy malts. Nothing terribly overpowering here, infact it was fairly well balanced. The flavor was more of the same, started out with a rolling bready malt flavor which coated the tonguey with a viscous, medium bodied feel, soem really nice bitter notes as it passed, with pine and grass mixed with a light grapefruit touch in the finish, Decent carbonation throughout and a good drinkability. No hint of the alcohol at all throughout the session.

A- golden, hazy, darker orange body with a small white head. Stays for a few minutes for fading
S- a good strong pine and malts smell, not getting much citrus almost a spruce pine smell, spice
T- a small amount of citrus up front and then a good amount of malt becomes apparent, spicy hoppy finish
M- thicker, more of a full body, medium carbonation makes for a smoother finish

2/3/10 tasting, noticeably the freshest. Can deffinately feel it in the body and finish. It was a little to malty for me in the taste though

Poured from a bottle into a tulip.

Really this entire bottle for $13 was entirely disappointing.

Tasted and smelled like sticky sweet malt, nearly no hops, and had a slightly soapy taste.

For a DIPA I'd imagine FAR more hops. Can't believe I paid this much for this...not good

Clear orange copper with tangerine highlights. Big Foamy beige head. Thick foamy lace.

Citrus grapefruit, spicy herbal. Touch of toasty caramel and bready yeast.

Bitter pine, Grapefruit rind, spicy resinous herbal hops. Some toasty bready caramel malt flavor in the background. spicy yeast esters. Some booze. Big resinous bitterness.

Thick and sticky, coating, resinous. dry, slightly astringent, med body.

Good drinkability for me, but perhaps too bitter for some. Big bitter brew. Good summit hop bomb.

A - After the pour it generates about an inch of off-white head that fades fairly quickly but leaves some nice spider lacing and settles as a thick ring. The beer is slightly hazy and has a dark amber with a good amount of orange accents.

S - I'm reviewing this on the tail end of the bottle, but i can say that at first i smelled lots of piney, juicy grapefruit and, citrus notes. Now i'm smelling a bunch of malt and caramel.

M - Very smooth carbonation and lots forward hop bitterness.

T - I definitely taste all 95 IBU's, but at this point its pretty heavily malted. At first there was a ton ton of grapefruit, citrus, but now its mostly malty and bitter, but dont get me wrong, I'm loving it. It leaves my mouth dry and lingers for a while.

This is a great beer. It evolves over the course of my session and i should have started reviewing it sooner to document the full progression of tastes. I'm looking forward to the next iteration and will keep my eyes peeled for older bottles.

Thanks to AmericanBrew for sharing this bottle at a recent tasting.

The beer pours a light orange color with a white head. The aroma is very hoppy with some nice resinous hop notes. The flavor is more of the same with resiny hops and medium bitterness as well as some citrus notes, mainly pineapple but also some orange. Medium mouthfeel and medium carbonation.

What's the perfect beer to drink when you're already "one toke over the line." I think this might be it....

The beer pours an orange coolaide color with pretty good head retention, and some nasty looking, sticky lacing (I already like this beer). On the nose I get celery salt, dank earth, onion bagel (only because I'd been forwarned and knew waht to expect - but it really does give off that aroma), cherry and mandarin orange. If ever there was a bizarre (and yet somehow endearing), hophead's dream of a nose, this is it. On the plate... this is just too weird. The first thing I notice is the huge, bitter, alcoholic bite on the finish... though there's also some sweet malt in the mid palate, coupled with some serious hoppy bitterness. The beer starts out as if it's going to be fairly sweet, but then the hops come on strong and completely destroy that thought. This beer is very dry and bitter on the finish; something that is all the more noticeable after the initial malty sweetness. Mouthfeel is medium bodied to full, with a long, drawn out finish. Drinkability is not this beer's best attribute, as the noticeable alcohol, sweet malt, and all the other weird flavors are just a bit too much to take.

Not my favorite beer by any stretch, but it's hard not to be impressed by the cajones it takes to make such a wildly, distinctive beer. Sometimes that's what I'm in the mood for. Like tonight... Impressive.

This bottle showed up on my front steps just hours before our tasting was supposed to start. Thanks to randawakes for expediting this down to us for the tasting! Poured at cellar temperature as the third beer in our epic tasting.

The pour is very characteristic of double IPAs, producing a coppery brown liquid with a thick 1-finger head (only due to a very careful pour) and a nice sticky gobbed up lace pattern. The body of the liquid itself is crystal clear.

Fully hopped with summit hops, I make out aromas that I have never experienced in a DIPA...or any beer, for that matter...There is a somewhat onion-like aroma that I am thrown off by, but Dyan mentioned that summit hops can create that character. The summit hop aroma is followed by caramel malts and a subdued citrus hop aroma in the background.

As the caramel malts in the nose indicate, this beer has faded somewhat from its original state, however, there is still an inviting bitterness to the flavor. The caramel malts remain potent against the odd onion bagel-like flavors that the hops impart. Alcohol is not hidden very well.

This beer is almost right-on as far as the texture that you would expect when diving tongue-first into a big double IPA, but I find the hop aromas and flavors somewhat astringent. Not the most drinkable, but since I will likely never be able to try another beer in this series, I am stoked to have gotten a chance to indulge.

The third beer of the Most Epic Fucking Tasting You Wish You Were A Part Of. Thanks for shipping this overnight from Alaska, Kyle!

Clear amber with a dense off white head with excellent retention and lacing, this beer is gorgeous. The nose is intense. While definitely faded, there's plenty of caramel with a pungent pine hop character. The alcohol is quite noticeable. Bitterness is noticeable. The hop character is strange. While there's the pine and moderate citrus, I get a strange onion bagel like character; I hear that's a characteristic of Summit hops.

The palate opens with a moderate hop bitterness with grapefruit and pine with a blend of honey and caramel. The strangeness of the nose is present, with a mild onion character being noticeable along with a slightly buttery/slick mouthfeel. Moderate bitterness is present on the finish with pine. Moderate in body with moderate carbonation, this is solid stuff. Not the most enjoyable, but something I'm grateful for having the chance to try.

A - Hazy light amber topped with a persistent thin off-white, creamy foam.

S - Moderately-intense tangerine aroma followed with orange peel. Malts hard to detect, hops are dominant.

T - Intensely bitter, resinous hoppiness lingers long into the dry finish. Orange/tangerine flavors are apparent in the background.

M - Medium bodied and slightly chewy. Resiny. Moderate carbonation.

D - Hard to finish the bomber.

Thanks to BrewsB4Shrews for the bottles of Midnight Sun, a brewery I've wanted to try for quite a while. And a DIPA to boot. Woohoo!

Pours a classic golden amber. Smells like an IIPA, but it seems this aspect of the beer might have faded in the interim, the hops are present, but buried under a thin layer of earth.

Obliteration VI as I understand it was created with summit hops. I've had a couple other single hop beers & discovered loves (Simcoe!) & others that make me shrug (Cascade!). Summit falls into the latter category, now, I guess. Nice hop bite to it, & very slick, with an emphasis on pine oozing out of a fallen evergreen. It fell in the dirt, though. There's also an unpleasant undercurrent of metallica, not quite oxidation, like mouthing a nickel for too long. The sweet malt notes are coming up strong behind the hops with a cleaver as the music swells, but I'll forgive that in a four-month old IIPA.

The so-so hops & titanium aftertaste drag this down. I'd have liked to try it fresh - perhaps some bright hops screaming down the glass would have covered up these flaws. Two Midnight IIPAs, two yawns. I hope the next beers I have from the brewery bring me to a better place.

Bottle, home. I appreciate these single hop experiments as much as anyone and it's particularly fun to taste a relatively new hop variety like Summit, but I'm going to need to replace the enamel on my teeth after this beer. Obliteration is an apt name for this hop tea masquerading as beer. It's up there with Iron Springs Casey Jones and Hoppin' Frog Mean Manalishi for top palate-wrecking DIPAs. The aroma is all Summit goodness - tangerine rind, grapefruit rind and just a hint of herbaceous onion/garlic. The flavor is dry and, well, hoppy. My taste score keeps crawling up as I go through the bottle and my palate slowly adapts to the onslaught. I have no doubt that Midnight Sun can make an excellent DIPA; this beer would probably get a very high score with a different hop bill. Plus, I appreciate the experimentation, so my rating here doesn't quite reflect my full opinion of the beer and brewery, just my enjoyment of the flavor.

Bottled the first week of November

A - Pours a rich thick golden honey color. Nice creamy white head.

S - Super sweet citrus smells. Lots of grapefruit, clementine and navel orange. Touches of honey.

T - First taste is like taking a bite out of an over-ripe orange. There is a touch of bitterness, but it is quickly swallowed up. There is a ton of malts in here, but the overall sweetness brings you right back to the over-ripe citrus. The aftertaste contains the floral, piney, bitter hop flavor.

M - Medium body, with high carbonation. A touch thin for the style, and the abv. I think a slightly thicker body, with the same carbonation would have been much better.

D - Ehh. I really wanted to love this beer. It's hard to get beers from Midnight Sun, but I was a bit disappointed by this. The beer is simply too citrusy sweet. One and done.

22 oz bottle. Huge thanks to BrewsB4Shrews to hooking me up with this. Poured into my snifter.

A- Body is a deep blood orange with a slight uniform fogginess to it. Pours with a nice 1-2 finger head that subsides to about 1/2 finger and retains that well. Some lacing sticks down the glass.

S-Aroma is that of a heavier DIPA. Intense citrus, some earthy hops, and a huge caramel malt backbone. Not as bright as it is deep.

T-Taste is much like the aroma. Mild to moderate earthy and juicy citrus hops upfront with an equally dominant sweet caramel malt backbone. The finish has probably lost its luster with age but offers a balance of earthy hop flavors with a touch of refreshing pine. The moderate residual bitterness emerges slowly and lasts and lasts.

M- Moderate carbonation and body heavier than most DIPAs-oily and smooth in theory but the residual bitterness in the flavor hides the smoothness a lot.

D- This was a good, enjoyable, DIPA. This is one of the rare moments where I wish I lived in AK and could have tried this fresh because I imagine it would have been magnificent. Alcohol is well hidden.

Bomber from City Beer in SF, consumed there at the Midnight Sun debut event.

Pours clear amber with a one finger white head and excellent lacing.

Great aroma: fresh citrus and pine hops with some sweet malt.

Flavor is good but not as great as the aroma would suggest. Pale and caramel malt, citrusy and piney hops, and a little metallic on the finish.

Medium-full body for the style with average carbonation.

A good DIPA overall, but not really a standout. It's too bad Russian River didn't get to "Obliteration" first, since they're all about -tion names and "Obliteration" is an awesome name for a beer, but oh well, I'm beginning to like Midnight Sun a lot too.

Bomber poured into my sammy smith's imperial pint, Obliteration VI is a chill hazed dark gold with a big, dense off-white head leaving scattered foamy lace.

Smell is heavy hop resins, it's got that dry sticky kind of stink that would make a rapper brag about his hook-up. There's a sweetness to the malt, which combined with the spice of the summit's give it that gingerbread aroma (that tends to increase as it ages).

Taste is a huge blast of hops, resinous and dank, with a blistering bitterness to which the light biscuit flavored malt backbone struggles to stand up. This is about 4 months old (I recently picked it up at MSBC, I don't think it ever made it down here like many of the rest of the series), so I have to assume the actual hop flavor was more robust and balanced the bitterness bettter when fresh. It's got a touch of sweetness that hints at the heft (and slight age) but is otherwise smooth in the ABV dept.

Mouthfeel slick, bone dry, medium bodied.

Drinkability is really pretty good, my kind of DIPA with the heavy hop character countering the sweet malt (almost in the amber DIPA style, reminiscent of Lagunitas Lucky 13, one of my favorites). It's smooth and well made, and I like that it's a single hop showcase for Summits, the first commercial example of which I think I've had. Would have loved to had this 4 months ago, but better late then never...it's strikes me as the type that would hold up well enough, and I at least got this from their cooler, where it I'm sure had only recently been stocked...but was surely kept in their cold room since it was made, which is better then nothing!

Thanks to TomDecaplis...
Appears a semi-transparent orange with a small white head that slowly fades away. Spotty bits of lacing are left around the glass.
Smell is of hoppy juice, orange, grapefruit, and pine.
Taste is of the aromas with an over-abundance of hoppiness outweighing the malt. The tiny bit of caramel-like, sugar malt is buried way in the background.
Mouthfeel is medium bodied, bitter, and sweet.