Zodiac Series: Libra
Chapman Crafted Beer

 

 

Pour is a chalky pale yellow with faint orange hints, but this is primarily banana puree yellow. Small fuzzy white head settles in quickly to a loose galaxy and a thin ring of fuzz.

Nose leans towards hazy flavours of bruised beach fruits. Some creamy, but again like banana creamy not like milk creamy. A touch of lime and maybe melon creep into the edges. Standard modern-IPA flavours.

Tongue has much of the same. A thin sharp bitterness provides the emphasis for a body that is largely the greener fruits... Lime is the citrus, young papaya is the tropical component as opposed to like mango or pineapple, and there's faint melon and an earthy deep green. It's got a big dry-hopped-esque bitter back end.
It's mostly pretty thin with some colloidal bitterness to it. I don't know if it's dry hopped, but it has that impression of the powders to be found in the hop flowers that I get from a lot of the hazies/dry hopped beers. This is not harshly so that direction, which is easy to do and I've seen in a lot of well regarded offerings within the substyle, but it's not completely devoid of that character either.

This is a new school high notes/green IPA. It's not my favourite substyle within the IPA family, but it's well crafted and enjoyable enough (FWIW the GF enjoys it quite a bit. Probably better than I do, so it's probably more of an example of not being my preferred flavours/representation moreso than any failings of the beer itself).