Hop Quiz XPA
Brewsters Brewing Company & Restaurant - Eleventh Avenue

20oz 'true pint' at the Century Park location. A brew ostensibly created by the departing Olds College teaching brewery students, I guess interning at the head Foothills location in Calgary this summer.

This beer appears a clear, bright medium copper amber colour, with one thick finger of puffy, tightly foamy, and somewhat creamy dirty white head, which leaves some macabre pitted limestone wall lace around the glass as things evenly subside.

It smells of intense, if muddled tropical fruit (stone fruit and red berries), bready caramel malt, a twinge of biscuity toffee, some flinty minerality, and more leafy, floral, and piney green hop bitters. The taste is semi-sweet, grainy caramel malt, more candied toffee notes, some strawberry and generic melon fruitiness, wet stone paths, and a sort of testy leafy, herbal, and perfumed floral verdant hoppiness.

The carbonation is rather tame in its basically perfunctory frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and generally smooth, with a wee airy creaminess creeping in as things warm up a bit. It finishes well off-dry, the fruity and malty essences maintaining a veritable stranglehold on matters afoot.

Overall, this is a well-made pale ale, the hops chosen obviously of the tropical fruit ester producing nature, and good on the students for doing so, if only to remind us of the long summer recently passed. One thing, however - what is supposed to put the 'X' in the XPA?