Old Doug
Posts: 8279
Joined: 5/12/2011
From: Atlanta, Georgia, US
Status: offline
|
New Belgium 'Ranger' India Pale Ale. 9.9 New Belgium has totally and absolutely cracked my code.
I read the tasting notes on RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, and many people really like it, but rate it lower. Some people don't like it, although most of them are not IPA fans. Gotta like the bitter, gotta like the pine.... Some give it 5 out of 5; they must be like me.
Zymurgy Magazine, the publication of the American Homebrewers Association, recently had its readers vote Bell's Two Hearted Ale as the 2nd best beer in America. Russian River's Pliny the Elder was #1.
Well, I've never had the mighty P the E, though I'm a psychic Pisces and I bet there is some out there for me, somewhere, sometime. Just had a sizable quantity of Two Hearted Ale, two nights ago. It is excellent, it is full and engaging, to me it's like music produced as Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" - so many instruments in a cunningly dense arrangement, no gap unfilled. Intriguing, able to carry one away, but still, in the end, a little too much for me, too busy, no room for the more pure elements to run, no room for the dreams to really get going. Give me that single cello.
Or just give me that initial hard hit of pine resin - the old Ranger doesn't really bring the hops to you until you swallow, until there's air in your mouth. Oh, you know you're drinking an IPA just from the smell and the first taste, but the bitter doesn't really arrive until you swallow.
You swallow, and that's when you really taste and smell the whole deal - it's a smooth curve with the bitter hoppiness rising, plateauing, then falling, as citrus comes in, prominent lemon, fresh grass, and then honey and butter.
I don't know if it really tastes like honey and butter. Maybe this is but a "reflection," a reaction to the bitterness fading on the taste buds. Taste is relative, and can be affected by other things than one chemical or one present chemical group's nature. Example: I once got a six-pack of beer and a half gallon of vanilla ice cream; (yeah - that new diet didn't work out).
After eating the sweet ice cream - which really is just *so sweet* - they have to have a huge amount of sugar in it, as people almost always eat it cold, and cold things don't rock our sweet-sensing tastebuds so readily - after tasting the big sweet, then the beer tasted incredibly bitter by comparison, and this was not a bitter brew at all, by any means, to start with.
The beer's taste was altered, massively, by what I'd tasted before - nothing to do with the actual nature of the beer itself.
I think that is what's happening with the Ranger, it is the decline of the Bitter that accounts for some of the perceived tastes, they are not all there "on their own." It's all part of the magic, and I would think this principle has application in the wine world as well.
So, yeah, a long, wordy post. Well, as I've said for a long time - I like my prolix verbosity as well as my periphrasic circumlocution. In the end, I have to put Ranger as a full magnitude better than the Two Hearted Ale. They must have made it just for me.
|
Printable Version
RE: What BEER are you drinking? - 
Like Pisces, it's the last in the series. There is also the 'Element' associated with a given birth year - the repeating sequence of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water, each one lasting for two birth years, making for an overall greater cycle of 60 years. I'm an "Earth Pig," and for 1968/1969, you'd be an "Earth Monkey." My Earth brother Dave. 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread