Black IPA
Fort Garry Brewing Company Ltd.

 

 

Tasting notes: Black-brown, some hard candy, cold coffee, and citrus rind on the nose, maybe a little dried mango and pine. Quite smooth and creamy, albeit a little husky. Yellow grapefruit, bitter green leaf, cacao powder, a splash of coffee creamer, becomes less fruity and more floral over time. Dry floral/rind/roasted finish. Hops getting more piney as well. Fortunately the beer is better than the grammar on the can. There is a bit of an identity crisis ... Coarse compared to the true greats of the style. The hops overpower and the malts swing grainy. Still, a decent tall can on a Friday night.

 

473ml can. 'This IPA finishes slightly creamy with a smooth finish', verbatim from the label - and people get paid to do this sort of thing.

This beer pours a clear, dark brownish amber colour, with three fat fingers of puffy, densely foamy, and mildly creamy tan head, which leaves some broad pre-continental drift lace around the glass as things evenly subside.

It smells of lightly roasted caramel malt, cheap bittersweet chocolate, abandoned on the countertop cafe-au-lait, and tame leafy, citrusy, and earthy hops. The taste is grainy, gritty caramel malt, wet ash, an indeterminate sour dark fruitiness, Zellers' cocoa wafers, a weird metallic stoniness, cold day-old coffee, and piney, leafy, and mildly perfumed hops.

The carbonation is fairly light and inoffensive in its quotidian fizziness, the body a generally solid middleweight, and smooth (I haven't finished just yet), with a small, niggling creaminess - there, now I have. Wait, no, it finishes off-dry, the tainted caramel malt shuffling amongst the remaining citrusy and piney hops, all trying not to step on those errant coffee spills.

A more or less adequate rendering of this newish style, exhibiting the twin, and still mostly incompatible traits in spades. Yes, it could be hoppier, but that's never really been in Fort Garry's wheelhouse, so I guess that we should be happy for what we got, even if it is a wee bit off-center, and not in the good way.