Some activities are destined for monotony: if you do that one thing, over and over again, for a while, the possibility for surprise goes away. Ride a roller coaster enough and you will certainly get bored. Eat the super spicy salsa and it will get bland. Drink the same beer over and over and your taste buds will tire. Trust me, I drink one or two beers every day, and yes, I get bored. I spend in the hundreds of dollars a month on different beers and I still get bored. Even when I drink as many different beers as I possibly can, I still end up getting tired of the same flavors, so it’s always a surprise when I taste a beer that shakes me out of my senses and makes me re-evaluate my assumptions.
If you’re like me, the phrases, “mobile canning,” “rural Indiana” and “dank-ass IPA” would never be uttered in the same sentence. In fact, I hate anything and everything from Indiana except 3 Floyds Brewing, Peyton Manning and Michael Jackson (this applies to the hole of the midwest, and no that’s not a typo, the midwest is a hole). So my expectations for the state and the region are super low, but a wonderful series of events led me to drink some awesome beers from rural Indiana.
The owner of Bare Hands Brewing in Granger, Indiana, was vacationing in Durango in early April and dropped off a few of his beers at Ska and took a little tour of our facility. I wasn’t there, but benefited from the exchange and was able to take one of each style of beer home. After reading the label, I was not expecting much from Indiana or “mobile canning” (a canning line moved from brewery to brewery in a truck or van). I drank a Decadent Imperial IPA first. When I cracked the first beer from Bare Hands, Westy IPA, I had a decent buzz and didn’t even pour it into a glass, but the aroma leapt from the can and the flavors were mind blowing even though my taste buds were numb from the high ABV. I also didn’t take notes, because I didn’t anticipate writing about the beer, I just drank and enjoyed the fresh and juicy hops. Then I opened the next, Honey Badger Double IPA, and again I was blown away by how good it was! Like the Westy, the hops were fresh and juicy, and it was a beautiful beer. There was no time for reflection or savoring, but immediate gratification. I wish I had given it the proper respect, but in the moment it was such a pleasure I couldn’t resist. There was no going back, no way to repeat the experience. The only Bare Hands beer on this side of the continental divide had been drank. To paraphrase the French Surrealist Stephane Mallarme: Dammit! The flesh is sad, and I drank all the beer!
Now, I hate to get your hopes up about a super awesome beer that you can’t try unless you go to Indiana, so I will say that there are other beers that you can get here in town, that are equally as surprising and possessing enough flavor to wake you from your beer doldrums. Carver Brewing has a new IPA, Main Ave IPA, that pours a gorgeous yellow-orange with a soft, long-lasting foam, and loaded with southern hemisphere hops that give the beer an intense aroma and flavor profile of wildflowers, fruits (you name the fruit and likely there will be a note or two in there), and pine. It makes me want to wax poetic about walking through a pine forest on the edge of an orchard with a high mountain meadow in full bloom. There’s also no balance to this beer: The malt is subtle and really lets the hops shine (Actually, wait, three days after writing this I have been informed that Carver’s has sold out of all the Main Ave IPA, so maybe this isn’t about surprises, but unattainable delights … Someone tell PJ and Cody get make a new batch, ASAP).
And I don’t really like to suggest beers by AB-InBev sellouts, but Elysian’s Dayglo IPA was a flavor explosion. I had it at pint night at The Ranch, and the first surprise was that it wasn’t the usually $3 pint night price ($8 a pint!), but the color, aroma and basically everything else about the beer made it stand out from all the other handles in The Ranch, so it was totally worth it.
And if you want to drink a beer out of a can, the new Briny Watermelon Gose from Anderson Valley Brewing is what I love to see in a Gose: not too salty and not too sour. It’s surprising because I really don’t like watermelon beers; the sweetness is usually too much, and I also hate watermelon with salt on it. Anderson Valley’s other entries in the Highway 128 series seem to have a flaw that the watermelon fixes: The regular Gose is too salty, the blood orange is too sour, but the watermelon is just right. It’s also in a can, so I’m definitely going to have a few on hand all summer.
Robert Alan Wendeborn puts the bubbles in the beer at Ska Brewing Company. His first book of poetry, “The Blank Target,” was published this past spring by The Lettered Streets Press and is available at Maria’s Bookshop. [email protected]
