Humboldt County Gold
Watson Farmhouse Brewery

The suspiciously copyright violating can art caught my eye and twisted my head, thinking I was seeing cans of Pliny the Elder on the wrong side of the continent. After substantial hype was instilled into me by the liquor store employees about this being essentially a clone of the world‘s most famous West Coast IPA… I should’ve known better than to expect something exceptional. Unfortunately this beer tastes much more like a primitive attempt at a generic ipa like something from the caveman days of craft/home brewing. Unappealing finely bubbled foam that dissipates into absolute flat nothing. Nothing clings to the glass. There’s a pissy lager vibe about it and an underwhelming sense of hops… Not exactly what I think of with high-quality West Coast IPA. It’s overly dry and dusty tasting. There is not a single hop flavor that can be discerned. When I go to check the date of the cans (because I suspect it must be old to have so little flavor) it simply says “keep it fresh“ which is actually somewhat insulting and worthless to the consumer. The best feature of this beer is the minerality but it drinks quite thin for an 8%. It tastes much more like a watered down new school West Coast in that it’s not nearly bitter enough, there’s not a ton of malt heft, no caramel to offset the usual vicious bitterness, pine and dank aggressiveness of Pacific grown hops that real ipa drinkers long for. It’s honestly hard to drink. If I’m sounding overly harsh or overly critical, I think that is because it has been years since I have had a quality, West Coast IPA here on the East Coast and my patience grows thin and to blatantly borrow the iconography of a famous brand is shameless especially when what you deliver is subpar.