Celebration White IPA
Brewsters Brewing Company & Restaurant - Eleventh Avenue

 

 

20 oz. pint, on tap at the Century Park Brewster's. This is a lovely looking beer. Appropriately cloudy, with a substantial lingering white head. The flavour is heavy on the wheat malt with a bit of pepper and floral hopping to keep true to the style. Perhaps not as delicious as a Chainbreaker or Great White Combine, but a lovely rendition of a style I am growing to love.

1L howler from the Century Park Liquor Depot (it's really close to my house), who informed me that they got the keg directly from Brewsters. Anyway, this is the beer that Edmonton Oliver head brewer Gunther made (I have it on good authority, by request) for his daughter's wedding.

This beer pours a very cloudy, dark tarnished yellow colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, very loosely foamy, and equally bubbly off-white head, which leaves some stellar haunted woods webbed lace around the glass as it genially subsides. Wow, thick-looking!

It smells of musty and meaty, wheat and caramel malt, sharp yeasty esters, dried banana chips, muted citrus fruit notes, a further mild tropical fruitiness, some faint white pepper and clove spice, and more leafy, weedy, and floral hop bitters. The taste is bready and doughy caramel and spicy wheat malt, a lesser, and more respectful Belgian-adjacent yeasty acerbity, mixed and matched pale orchard fruity essences, a weak white toastiness, some fading earthy spiciness, and more leafy, floral, and mildly perfumed hoppiness.

The carbonation is decently active in its trilling frothiness, the body on the light side of yer typical medium weight, and generally smooth, with the merest of airy creaminess making gravy as things warm up a tad. It finishes off-dry, the musty yeast, middling malt, and green and citrusy hops coming together like they're not exactly the star of the current affair, or something.

Well, Gunther, my sort of 'alter Freund', you have verily nailed the style in terms of providing a yeasty, acerbic, and yet still verily hoppy pale ale, so I do hope that your kith and kin appreciate your efforts herein, as I certainly have, standing very far on the outside, and only barely looking in.