Moylan's Hopsickle Imperial Ale aka Beer Review #1

I love beer.

I love beer like I love Jesus, my life and Brian Colmery.

I'm going to start posting beer reviews (and hopefully reviews of my other vices, as well) here on a fairly regular basis. I guess that I'll have a use for the tags after all.

Okay, on with the show!

First up on the block is Moylan's Hopsickle Imperial Ale.

This beer promises to be a hop bomb and is highly hopped with Tomahawk, Cascade and Centennial hops. These are all very west coast hops (especially Cascade).

The beer pours a slightly hazy, rusty copper color. It has a very tight, modest cream-colored head.

The aroma is incredible. I love really hoppy beers and this one is unique in that it actually smells like a handful of fresh hops. It has very prominent tar and pine needle aromas. Again, very indicative of it west coast hop profile. Now, I'm not terribly familiar with the stuff, but this beer smells like weed. Cannabis and the hop vine are closely related and this stuff smells like the inside of Dr. Dre's studio. Anyway, the hop smells dominate with very little alcohol (despite weighing in at 9.2%) or malt in the background.

That aroma carries over in to the taste. While quite bitter, this is not a hop bitch-slap like, say, Stone Ruination. The overwhelming impression is a really deep, slightly spicy hop flavor that is backed up by the bitterness and not the other way around. It's a huge, citrusy (grapefruit) affair that recedes into a lingering, peppery finish. It's not at all a balanced beer and there is just enough of a malt background to keep the beer from being too one-dimensional and surprisingly little alcohol taste for such a potent beer. This is not necessarily a bad thing and should be expected from a beer with the word "hop" in its name.

This beer is very refreshing. Literally, with it's dryish finish and figuratively with it's amazing actual hop flavor, instead of a flavorless, punishing hop bitterness. It's a solid pick for the certified Hophead and someone looking to move into hoppier beers alike.