Driftwood brewery Fat Tug IPA

Hops, one of the four pillars of brewing.  When brewed in concert with malt, water, and hops it can do amazing things and produce amazing beers.  Over time people have added, subtracted, made extracts, and used different varieties of hops to produce different recipes.  When the craft brew movement started, the tend was up, up, up in terms of hop content to make some incredibly hoppy and bitter beers.  As more craft brewers came on board a sort of arms race developed to produce some of the hoppiest beers imaginable.  Unfortunately these beers came to be very difficult to drink and gave craft beer a rather unfortunate reputation as being all about the uber hoppy IPA and not about making beers to appeal to a wider swath of the beer drinking population.  Fat Tug is a bit of a throwback to these wild west years of hoppiness, strong, bitter, and a very good IPA, if that's your sort of thing.

It pours a deceptively pale straw colour, not something you would necessarily associate with a beer of this strength.  On the nose you get that trademark citrus taste that IPA's are known for, but it's not overly pungent.  On the sip you get smacked right across the face with hops, make no bones about it, this beer is hoppy and strong with very strong grapefruit flavours.  As the sip progresses it actually smooths out quite nicely into an almost creamy middle with sweeter fruit such as mango notes before the hops come back for round 2 with a punch finish.   It's a very interesting and well balanced beer, but I feel as though the went a bit overboard with all the hops.  The IBU count is in the 80's, but that's a bit unnecessary.  This would be just as good, if not better a beer if it was in the 65-70 IBU range.  If you love hops then you will really like this beer as it is quite balanced, and even someone like me who isn't an IPA fan can appreciate the balance of it, I just feel as though I would appreciate it more if they toned down the hops a little.   

I honestly don't know the extend of the distribution network.  It's brewed in Victoria, BC and a bottle ended up in my fridge after a party.  Their website doesn't indicate how far across Canada it is sold, but the LCBO doesn't list it among their products.  If anyone knows more about the distribution network please let me know and I'll update this post.

Alc 7%

IBU 80+

Rating: 4 steins

What you need to know

Brewery Address

102-450 Hillside Ave

Victoria, British Columbia

V8T1Y7

Website

http://driftwoodbeer.com/

Twitter

@Driftwoodbeer

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/driftwoodbeer/