You're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Up in your feed, I'm Greg. I do communications at Binny's. I'm Dan. I do spirits at Binny's. Hey, I'm Chris. I do wine-related things. And I'm Roger. I work in beer. And today, we're going to drink some beers. It's a Roger episode. We're going to drink beers that Greg likes. It's a Greg episode. Wait, Dan, do you like beer? Some days. It's a Dan episode. Oh, no, man. I was like, to Jim, I was like, hey, you should see if Roger wants to do a West Coast IPA episode. Any excuse? Luckily though, there are other people like you, Greg, that have been suffering in silence during these hazy days of the takeover. And while some people might not quite be ready to embrace old school West Coast IPAs, the term West Coast is somewhat changed. So, this is a very good episode to do, because I think as you'll taste what you believe to be a West Coast IPA. Yes. There is now what I've supposed in the beer classes that we did recently. I think we should look at them as classic West Coast and then modern West Coast. That's right. The subdivision of IPA needs to be subdivided. How many categories of IPA were you up to right now? Oh, man. It's less categories and more a spectrum. Competition categories? Yeah. Even in BJCP, it's funny to think some of the ones that they begrudgingly allowed. When they tried to do Black IPA at BJCP, the old men were just like, no, it's a stout. It's a hoppy stout. We're not doing it. Then they finally acquiesce and now there's anything. I think cold IPA even made it. That's not even an IPA. Maybe that one didn't, but hazy very much did, milkshake did. Thankfully, milkshakes are starting to disappear, which is nice. Again, the biggest dichotomy, I would say, Greg, you're Mr. Hopps, but you do like with your IPA some more backbone to them. Absolutely. That's what's disappearing. I agree. A beer from a beloved local brewery came out and I was like, Roger, I need to try this. He was like, yes, you do. Then I was like, okay, it was pretty hoppy, but there's no- Yeah, where's the balance? Balance, there's no body, there's no spine, it's just hops. He's like, yep, that's the new school West Coast IPA. Modern pale West Coast IPA. They like them clear. Most of the people were pretty transparent about the malt and hop bills, which is cool. But yeah, lots of the new West Coast, the malt bills just too row and Pilsner. I mean, that's- Come on, guys. No caramel character, no roast at all. So they look, the argument is that the malts get in the way of the hop profile, which is I think a little ridiculous. Get in the way. They're not supposed to go hand in hand. Maybe balance, but- Have you ever heard of hop water? I mean, lovely example for local Binny's. Okay. Yeah. But Roger is going to show us some good examples? Yeah. You're going to get a taste of old school, normal, West Coast IPA. A lot of the new ones are doubles, so a lot of strong stuff, also your wheelhouse. All right. We're going to taste our way through quite a few reiterations. I think the neat thing today is that we're going to be talking a lot about classic American hops, like classic Z hops, but also a lot of really cool new recently named hops, so it's going to be all over the board. Awesome. Love that sound. What are we pouring first? All right. So to get kind of a baseline, I figure we needed to pay homage and do one of the all-time classic West Coast, always referred to itself as a West Coast style IPA. This is Firestone Walker Union Jack. Yay. Which despite the English name, the only thing really English about it, there's some light crystal malt. So the English refer to their caramelized malts as crystal malts. I don't know if the malt actually comes from England that they're using. I would imagine they might use a little bit. Then the yeast is English, as is the case in almost all early American craft beer. It was all very much taking a playbook out of the English brewing tradition, but with American hops. So this is made with a mixture of two row Munich, a German style malt with some color, light crystal. The main hops are CTZ, Columbus, Tomahawk, Zeus, Cascade and Centennial. So three classic C hops. And then the dry hop is Cascade, Centennial, Simcoe, Citra, Amarelo, and Chinook. Dang. That makes for a bitter and fruity combination, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think you get all of that. Yeah. Well, let's try it. This smells great. Yeah. The nose in this is that. I always forget that this exists. I always forget that this exists. It's from the other side of the country. Well, I guess we're in the middle of the country, but you know what I'm saying? It's like walking into a brew pub in 2004. That's it. Yeah. So good. Oh, man. Grapefruit and lots of grapefruit. You know, you're zombie dust and gumball head fans. Not that they exist anymore, but this is right in that same wheelhouse. Yeah. I mean, this has all the citrus, as the kids say. I often try to say when you're writing beer reviews, to don't be general, like be specific. So, grapefruit is the classic descriptor for old school American hops, but on top of grapefruit, which is very big on the finish here, aromatic wise and in the mid palate, you get lemon, tangerine, orange, almost all of the main citrus fruits. That's true. The bitterness is compounded with a little bit of a piney resin. Yeah, for sure. This has Chinook in it, which is arguably one of the most piney hops. Citra and Simcoe, Veri and Amarillo, all very citrus forward, Cascade, Centennial, Floral, Fruity. It really does hit all that classic. It really does. My first thought when I smelled it was, wow, flowers, fruit, herbaceousness all at once. That's got the beautiful like biscuity malt character on the back end. That's so balanced. It is balanced, exactly. It's like a light and it's like almost a fluffy beer, and it's 7% alcohol. You can't tell. You can't tell. This is crushable. Yeah. 60 IBU, which compared to some of the- That ain't shy. When the pendulum swang the other way in the East Coast, in the beginning, some of those early Vermont ones, they were still plenty bitter. Then in the Midwest here in particular, I feel like if East Coast IPA was described as being juice-like, brewers turned it into literally juice, and there's quite a few East Coast New England style IPAs, or there's no hops in the kettle. We haven't had Roger complaining about juicy IPAs so far in 2025 on your Barrel to Bottle bingo card. How insane is that? Three of us in this room at least used to brew beer. Could you ever have imagined putting together an IPA recipe with no hops in the kettle? No. It's insane. It's horrible from our- It doesn't make any sense. From both a retailer and eventually the brewer standpoint too, it greatly affects the shelf stability of the beer. So you have a style which originated as having this long shelf life now has like zero shelf life. How ironic is that? We just forego the preservative qualities of hops entirely. Well, that's not what this episode is about. Okay. The next beer that we're going to try is from a Roadhouse Brewing, which is relatively new to our market. They're from Wyoming, of all places. You don't see many beers coming from Wyoming. I got the blues. Chances are, if you've tried a Roadhouse beer, that you might have seen them or had one at a Lazy Dog restaurant. Lazy Dog chain of places famous for their dog policy. They allow dogs. They allow dogs. But only dogs on Diazepam. I was excited when they came to town. They're from Scrat's Kitchen, but they're like a brew pub type place. Those used to be all over the place and there's not that many now. A lot of food items designed to pair well with beers. Roadhouse ended up purchasing Melvin Brewing. I don't know if you guys remember Melvin was in the market for a real brief blip. Sure do. I was impressed with their beers. I thought the quality of their beers was always really high. Their two by fours are my favorite double IPAs of all time. They're all one entity now. Roadhouse inherited the Lazy Dog connection, but you'll see Roadhouse, Melvin, and then all the house beers for Lazy Dog are brewed at Roadhouse Melvin. Their brewer, his name is Max Schaefer, and I always like to tout when people go to brewing school. I think that's a cool thing to celebrate. We hear a lot of stories about people that were like lawyers and hated being a lawyer, and then their wife got them a home brew kit, and now they opened a brewery. That's cool. That's cool. Or you could maybe go work at a brewery for a while, or go to brewing school, or maybe go to brewing school and work at a brewery before you open your own brewery. So, Max did that. He went to Siebel, graduated from that academy, then he worked at Grand Teton, and he's been at Roadhouse for a long time. I'm pretty impressed with their beers. This is called Interstellar Kush. It's part of a rotating series they do, where they collaborate with different breweries. We're going to be showing a lot of love to Half Acre today, in part because they're an awesome brewery. Secondly, Greg loves Half Acre. This is a Greg homage episode. Roger, I had an Interstellar Kush yesterday. Oh, nice. Well, here you go. I'll be honest, you told me to try this beer a few weeks ago and I've been doing Dryish January, which means I just have one Old Fashioned every night. So, this is my first time having it. It is a lovely beer. I woke up this morning and got myself this beer. Perfect tie in there, Morrison. Part of the reason I love this beer is that it has strata in it, Jim Q. The Horn. Strata, I often describe as being very juicy fruit gum-like. So, for you loyal listeners, you know what that means. It's very much like jackfruit. You don't know jack. One of our favorite fruits. Besides strata, this also features a hop that was just recently named. It previously was HBC 586. We've used it in our collab with Halfacre. I've written about all sorts of different beers. They use it. I think it's going to be one of the most talked about hops in 2025. It is called Crush. I don't know why they- With a K? With a K. With a K. Crush really can. They probably can't use a C. It's probably copyrighted by the orange people. Oh yeah, probably. So keep an eye out for Crush. I've already seen even- We're barely into 2025. There's been quite a few beers with it already. We're going to try another two more beers with it. So it's getting out there. But the last hop is HBC 1019, which I think is another funky experimental hop that throws some- It's not from the Southern Hemisphere, but it reminds me of Southern Hemisphere hop. So you get some of those famous Nelson components, the gooseberry wine-like character to it. You'll see this is pretty clear. It's pale golden in color. From a mall perspective, I don't have the bill, but I would guess it's not like- What seemingly is resonating with people are these, in a lot of ways, the interest in West Coast, I think, is that it's like the anti-hazy. So it's not super cloudy. It doesn't look like orange juice. This has just the slightest haze. Yeah. But it's very light in color and very transparent despite those slight haze. But I wouldn't note that there is a toasty malt component here. Yeah. It is discernible for sure. Yeah. I get a little bit of a honey character. There's a sweetness, especially lingering on the finish. You said honey. I was thinking apricot. It might be like a combination of those things. Yeah. It sticks around for a while. It's bittersweet though. I mean, it's definitely, and I think that is, if we could all really articulate what a lot of us are looking for in an IPA, it's probably somewhere, something in the middle. We might not want a total old school IPA, the exception of Greg, with classic Seahops only being very piney, very resinous, very citrus, grapefruity. But then if the other end of the spectrum is like zero bitterness, all juice, all tropical fruit, you can compromise and have something in the middle that's well fermented, not sticky sweet, not super bitter, but it's still very dry hop forward. Because I think what people fell in love with, with the New England style, are these huge aromatics and things that smell way different than anything they had ever experienced before. For quite a long time, you had citrus and pine, and that was like, what kind of citrus? Is it more spruce-y, cedar-y? But it was a lot of derivations of citrus. Now, with some of these newer school hops, you got every fruit in the fruit department. So tell me I'm wrong. It was right around, I don't know, 2011 or 2012 when they started brewing lots of stuff with Galaxy and Citra and that added this element of fruitiness that everybody loved. It was just like the gateway drug into the slop that came next. But that was such a wonderful moment where it was big. Don't forget mosaic. Mosaic and I want to say like Amarillo too. Citra and mosaic were the game changer moments. That was when really it started to change and you get to see a lot more of these like pineapple, guava, other like tropical fruit. We can still have that folks. You can still make those beers and they're delicious. They have some bitterness and some for everybody. I mean, what I loved with this Roadhouse beer is it's 7 percent, so it's not huge beer, but it's really easy to drink. You can drink a whole 16 ounce can of it and still want another one, which hasn't really been the case with the direction that a lot of IPAs have been going, whether or not they're stronger or they're just more decadent, sweeter, heavier. This gets the Greg Drinkable Seal of Approval. I'm not clamoring for it, but I'm glad that it exists. Well, we're going to keep the crush train going. So that was called Kush, not Crush. Let's go Kush. Interstellar Kush. Interstellar Kush. The Kush series is evoking dank weed-like beers. So depending on who they collab with, there's a different prefix to them. Turpenes. So this is the most half-acre beer we've had since the half-acre episode. Yeah, it definitely is. I really wanted to do that Roadhouse one, and then I'm like, jeez, this is going to be like three half-acre now. But I don't know, they make pretty awesome beer. So sorry, not sorry, not sorry, as Stone Brewing once said. So Vallejo, I think probably the best IPAs to come out of Chicago from half-acre, is their seasonal beer. I think there's a trend in beer right now where you take a brand that has a lot of recognition and equity, and then you expand it. Oh, what? So there's now. Sunrise. There's going to be three different Vallejos. I believe that's Valleji. At least they're not all out at once. So this isn't like the hearted thing at Bells where there's big-hearted, hazy-hearted, little-hearted, blah, like there's a million now. Hugs, Skeletors, all the different beers. So this isn't quite as crazy. This is, I think, well thought out. They're doing season, so there's going to be a spring, a summer, and a fall. So this is Sunrise Vallejo. The summer will be Classic Vallejo, and then the fall will be Sunset. I have always loved Vallejo because it has Nelson in it. I'm pretty obsessed with Nelson Sauvignon Hops. This adds mosaic and crush to the party. Have you just have a glut of crush hops, this new experimental, no longer experimental hop? Yeah. I mean, honestly, 586 has been in a lot of beers, or maybe I just noticed it, but I would say of the experimentals, 586 and 1019 have been two of the more talked about in the recent past. It throws a lot of what people are looking for. A lot of descriptors talk about fruit candy. We've seen that be a big thing like peach ring and cotton candy, and gummies, and stuff like that. Various ranchers, Jolly. This is like a mind bender because I smelled it, and the aroma is just that full fruity, hazy. I expect it to be a soft, hazy, almost sweet profile, and it's got an awesome dose of bitterness, and this is a great beer. Yeah. The nose, I get the fruitiness, but I also get an earthy, purezine-like thing going on. I think you're not afraid to have a little bit of wildness in there. Yeah. I get a hint of asparagus, sweet pea, even earthy green bean in the nose, but I think all in very low levels and pleasant blended into the fruitiness. It's got, I mean, it still is very Nelson-forward, which people either I feel love Nelson or it's not for them. Yeah. I'm trying to think of some of the descriptors that people have said when they, I mean, once you try a gooseberry, I never shut up about these things, but it tastes exactly like green gooseberries. But if you don't know what those tastes like, which is understandable, they're sadly very hard to find. Sauvignon Blanc wine is what everybody points to. There's definitely gooseberry in the nose here. A funnier thing is when people say it reminds them of diesel fuel. So I can see some of that. There's kind of a dankness to this that's pretty earthy and intense, but dial back some from the normal Vallejo. So I would say if you're a fan of Vallejo, this is very much in the same vein, but a little more citrusy, a little more berry. I get some raspberry candy type of berry note from it that's pretty cool. Available right now through March. This comes in four pack cans, $11.99. That's a deal. I want to mention the Roadhouse four pack cans, $10.99. Crazy good price. And then Firestone Walker, we're seeing some brands move back to 12 ounce cans. Firestone's always just been rocking those. So six pack, 12 ounce cans, $12.99. I would also point out, like the last one, the body here is relatively light and this is incredibly drinkable. Yep. When do we get nuts? Let's get nuts. You want to get nuts? As if by cue, we're now going to talk about the body of a beer. This is Drip Castle from Half Acre. So this is a double IPA, 8%, also features crush hops. The malt bill on this guy, it's a little darker than the previous ones that we've tried, because there's a little bit of carapils, some victory and then dextrose. Wait, like just sugar? Yeah. Really? This is an old brewer's trick. On an unrelated note, have breweries run out of names for beers? Yes. Yeah. Long ago. This is like a VOC's album cover, album name. I often tell the story about Untapped where I was talking to a brewery about a collab beer, and we were making it with hops that were very coconutty, and we were going to put pineapple in it, I think. Anyway, I was like, I love obscure movie references. I'm like, we should call it, you didn't hit G7, you hit G8, which is a very obscure line from the movie Dirty Work, where Chris Farley's character, there's a bar fight. He goes, there's a fight on, you better put on something good. He's like, hell yeah, Rolling Stones, Street Fighting Man, D7. He's like, you didn't hit D7, you hit D8. They play If You Like Pina Colada. Rupert Holmes. When you name beers, you have to go on and tap first and see if anybody else has named it something. Two different breweries have brewed a beer and called it that. Really? Referencing the obscure line from the movie Dirty Work with Norm MacDonald. Couldn't believe it. I was floored. We've run out of names. They've all been used. Getting back to Drip Castle here, 8% made with Crush, Cryo Simcoe, and Chinook. So a neat mixture of some old school classic in Chinook, Simcoe, second tier wave of American hops, and then Crush is something brand new. The Dextrose here is a brewer's trick big in Belgium. You can increase the alcohol of the beer, but you're completely fermenting that sugar out. So you're not adding body, but you're adding a little bit of heft from the alcohol. It makes beers dangerously drinkable. That's why this still seems light on its feet. Yeah. It's crazy high in alcohol. Correct. What is the content on this? 8%. All right. So if I were to draw a shape for this beer, this beer is a guy at a gym who always skips leg day. It's so burly up in the hops area, but there's just not the malt to support it. So it's just a big top heavy dude. I like that. Yeah. This is beer that could get you in trouble real quick because it's pretty easy to drink. It's definitely using alcohol as a flavor, which I think some people don't talk about enough. Alcohol has a peppery quality to it, and I think that mixes nicely with the hops, especially Chinook. And the sweetness. Yeah. Yeah. Alcohol is a flavor. We literally have never said that. Yeah. I think there's a real through line here, post Firestone, and they're all just so drinkable and so light on their feet, but still delivering high-impact hop character. I think that's very much reactionary to the fact that we all had to learn that mouthfeel was a trending term in the beer world, and that people kept asking for IPAs with a thicker, fuller mouthfeel. The conversation got I think hijacked a bit by somewhat small but very vocal fanbase of people that wanted these really thick, heavy beers, which at the end of the day can be pretty interesting, but if you really were to categorize them, they're dessert beers. I just go to Oatmeal Stout or something like that, if I want. Yeah, I mean, we've always had beers that are rich. We continue to gripe about a beer that is not the style of this episode. No, I know, but I'm just saying, I bother to bring it up because I think that's how we got here and why people are marketing things as West Coast, yet this seems a lot. If I poured this for you and said, this is a West Coast IPA, you would go, what? It's softer and it's more fruity. But it has some bitterness to it. It's clear. I mean, there's elements of it that very much fit even the old school perception of what a West Coast is. I think there's room for both. It's just worth mentioning that there's a modern approach to the style that you should be aware of and that you might prefer to the old school one. If some of the old stone double IPAs, they were basically barley wines, so you might have hated those. That's not really the direction that a lot of breweries are going right now when they're making a West Coast IPA. By the way, Greg, I had a chance encounter with some San Diegan transplants just the other day, and they were bemoaning the lack of big, intense, hoppy San Diego IPAs. I would have hugged them. Yeah. I would have given them hugs. I can direct you to them. Okay. Oh, what? Okay, Revolution, what are we doing here? West Coast Hero. West Coast Hero, we got hobs and noob cans. Damn. This was previously available in four-pack 16-ounce cans. It was probably one of the most beloved one-off periodic releases from Revolution. So West Coast Hero is now going to be available year-round in a six-pack 12-ounce which is probably a little easier for people to manage since this is 8% alcohol. It is an awesome price. I'm also glad that it's not like three of the cans in a mixed 12-pack. Correct. Yeah. That was the other way you could get it, was in their variety 12-pack. So if you've been suffering through the League of Heroes just to get three cans of this, your ship has come in. That's what I'm talking about. Speaking of suffering, Foreigner 4 is a real triggering album for me. I hate that record. Never sing that song around me again. You don't know what will happen. It was a parody, so it doesn't count. You're right. Yeah. All right. So this has made the other thing of note, Revolution fought the whole hazy thing, kicking and screaming. They really were the old man yelling at the clouds and saying, we're not doing this. Then they very much jumped on board. But in the beginning, they loved writing DDH on stuff for double dry hop, because that became code for that something was a hazy IPA. Or a warning. Yeah. Right. So technically, just because you dry hop something, that has nothing to do with how thick, heavy or hazy it's going to be. It's just a process that's going to impart a ton of aromatics and arguably some flavor as well. So they're trolling people by making these really bitter, clear IPAs and then writing DDH on them. So as far as I know, this is the same beer as when they called it double dry hopped West Coast Hero, but they just finally took that off because honestly, it's probably a little confusing to people that are new to beer and are used to seeing all these New England hazy IPAs that say double dry hopped. But it is worth mentioning that you can dry hop a beer and it can be crystal clear. It doesn't have to be a thick, weighty New England style. The dry hopping has nothing to do with the mash bill or the way the- Right. It just has become synonymous with that. This has great hop aromatics. It's made with Simcoe, Centennial, Cascade, Amarillo, and Citra. I mean, if you are ever going to pick out the classics, I mean, that's pretty much all of them other than maybe Mosaic. Those are the all-stars right there. This is very much like a 2000 all-star team. It smells like the kind of cocktail I'd want to have on a beach on a warm January day. Interesting. I get warm January day. Are you in Australia? Yeah. Okay. Wait, are you saying that it has pineapple? It's very fruity and just inviting. Every time I stick my nose in that glass, I get something different. It has a fruit cocktail, all the fruits. Even some cherry. Pear, cherry. Yeah. Strangely, just like the other beer where I was getting a lot of the vegetable notes. Here, I'm getting this weird celery seed coriander undercurrent in the nose. I don't know why. Did you have hot dogs for lunch? No. Chris would never. That's not true. I love hot dogs. It's funny. Once you say that, I pick up on a cilantro coriander type thing in the nose. But before you said that, I wouldn't have necessarily put my finger on it. That is really nice though with some of these more complex IPAs when it isn't just fruit. I think when people write descriptors, they're sometimes afraid to use the greener, which is somewhat ironic because before we started breeding hops for all these fruit character, they pretty much all smelled and tasted like some herb. That's because people were afraid that the beer is going to taste like chives. Yeah. The onion chive thing is a real thing. Sometimes when it depends a lot on when a hop is picked. If you ever see a brewery talks about hand selecting hops, some of these hops when they're picked too late, I mean it is like drinking French onion. Well, there's so many dip, so many sulfur compounds in hops and alums, garlic, onions, that's all about sulfur too. So there's a lot of crossover, of course. I always felt like poorly used Galaxy would come across as oniony. I remember the chiviest beer I ever had. It was at a brew pub near Riot Fest. The first sip I was like, this is awesome. Then one more sip and I was like, oh wait. It was near Riot Fest. Yeah, near Riot Fest that one time. I think you'll get a kick out of the first time that I ever remember tasting that was at Sprecker in Wisconsin. Oh, wow. It was one of their early IP, like their double IPA or something. It's like, whoa, this is a thing. Bizarre. Interesting. By the way, they make awesome beer at Sprecker. They do. They're Black Bavarian. That's a classic. One of the best examples I would argue of a Schwarzbier. With that last hot bill, I was like, just about the only thing that's missing is Mosaic. This next beer was, when I first tried this, I was like, holy cow, what is this beer? I love this. This is Chillwave Double IPA from Great Lakes. They've been doing this a while, haven't they? Long time. They've been consistently just killing it with their rotating double IPAs, like Nosferatu. One of my favorite beers. Another phenomenon. Yeah, Lake Erie Monster. These Great Lakes, their IPA game gets overlooked. I think in part because they've never had good luck making a year-round IPA that's resonated with people. Their Commodore Perry IPA is interesting, but it was pretty unconventional, and it's almost like English-leaning, and it didn't really resonate with people. I mean, extra-conventional. Right. It actually is, but- I mean, they're known for their conventional brews, Dortmunder Gold, Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, you know. Yes. Okay. Everybody just quiet for a second. Okay. This one has the thing that I like finally. It has the thing that I like. It has the resinous, delicious, I don't know what, but underneath the hops, there is a breath here, and it is just sick how much I like this. Agreed. There's much more malt body here than a lot of what we've been tasting so far. It multiplies against the hops, and it adds to the fruitiness, and it adds to the heft and the weight, and there's a bitterness that goes along with this syrupy sweetness, and I love it. You like the booze too. Oh my God, I do. Booze is a flavor. It's a 9%. It's pretty dang delicious. I have to say. It is great. Okay. It uses crystal 45 malt and honey malt. I think the malt bill here is pretty unconventional. It's interesting. It's not that dark. It's not as dark as Nosferatu or Lickiery Monster. Oh, not even close. But compared to what we've been drinking, by far the most malt forward. Yeah. Yes. But then still tons of hops. There's nugget in here, which is probably mainly just for bittering, Mosaic, Calypso, Idaho 7, and Azaka. Love Azaka. Very cool mix of stuff here. I think Azaka almost has some Southern Hemisphere character. Idaho 7 famously, very pineapple forward. Very potato forward. Really cool nose. This reminds me of almost like some of the really old school. Session Barley wine. Barley. I was going to say like behemoth kind of had this very dink, almost strawberry note to it. Yeah. A lot of caramelized sugar. Yeah. I keep thinking molasses, but I know it's not molasses, but it is. It's a dark sugar. Yeah. It is caramel. You just don't want to say caramel, but yeah, it's caramelized sugar. Caramel. This is a good beer. Great beer. I commend Great Lakes for always doing food pairings. I think we need more of that in the beer world. They suggested Tikka Masala over this. I bet that would be great. I bet that would be great. Although Tikka Masala is great with a lot of stuff. Yeah, like rice and naan. Don't forget that hops amplify spice and vice versa. It could be really fun. If you've never tried it, you should. It's not for everybody. It'll really open your eyes as to holy cow. Very different experience with hops and heat. I agree. I love it. Watch out for this beer and Vindaloo. Yeah, that would really put you down. Burn your biscuit. This beer, when it first came out, was in four-pack 12-ounce bottle, then it shifted to four-pack 16-ounce can, and now it's in six-pack 12-ounce can. $13.99 a six-pack for a beer this big, pretty good price. I think it makes a little more sense to drink 12 ounces of this at a time instead of 16. Multiples of 12 ounces. Right. So like 2.6, 2.12 ounce, no problem. 2.16 ounce, hello. You drink 2.16, you're like, the third seems like a great idea. Then you're in trouble. Great, great idea. So yeah, this is available sadly for a limited time only, so you need to grab this while you see it, but don't sleep on Great Lakes IPAs. They make some really good ones. I might be drinking that tonight. Yeah. All right, speaking of session Barley wine. I remember when this first came out in a bomber. Also 9% alcohol, but, oh buddy, this is Three Floyd's Arctic Panzer Wolf. Speaking of running out of beer names, they're taking the German naming strategy here. Yes, and the Germans have one word that means Arctic Panzer Wolf though. Yes, it's Arctic Panzer Wolfen. Yeah. I think they, as proven by their Barbarian Haze beer, I think they were fans of the old Tamiya models. So those perfectly detailed scale models of military stuff. Panzer tank. So like the Panzer tanks were some of the most popular model kits. So I think that's part of why they came up with this. Oh, yeah. Hopefully, they're not just pro German military. Okay. Do you smell this? Do you smell this? It smells like beer. It smells like how beer used to be. It smells like beer. I'm getting like an herbal, like liquorish, almost anise kind of. Yeah. Huge pine. Floyd's, as I've much to my chagrin, they're always really, really cagey about their hops. They're a kind of ludicrously overprotective about that. So as far as what's in this, I don't know. If I had to guess, I would say that there's a pretty good chance that there's some Amarillo in here. Yeah. This is also ironically brewed with dextrose as well, even though. Why is that ironic? Because it adds alcohol, but it still has the breadth. Yeah. So the level of attenuation is still heavier than what we have been drinking. It's not heavy by any means, but no, I think it keeps it medium-bodied. There's certainly more malt weight, but at 9 percent, it was all malt, you would be feeling. Yeah. Well, there's something about these beers we've been drinking, even when they get to be higher alcohol and more caramel malt or whatever. That bitterness just makes you want more. It keeps me wanting to drink and I'm thirsty and I want to have some more. The bitterness is in balance with the robustness and the sweetness of it. Yeah. I was going to say that we may not know the exact hops here, but there's a good IBU wallop here for sure. Yes. It's the running joke that quite a few of their beers were. The top level you can perceive is 100. They would pretty much always just be 90 or 100. That's clipping all the time. Yeah. Exactly. In the red. To me, the finish to this very much reminds me of Marmalade. If you're one of those Marmalade fans, listeners out there. Marmalade boys. The very extremely bittersweet jam. I don't know. It's pretty apropos for beer when you think about it, because you almost always eat Marmalade on toast, and there's toast equalities to malt. Agreed. The great Seville orange. Basically, the point is that maybe you should share an Arctic Panzer Wolf with your grandma next time you stop by. Over breakfast. All right, so I got one more, and we kept going up and up and up. So, where do you get a load of this one? Seriously, I thought this was the pinnacle. I'm dancing in my pants. Simply the penultimate. Oh, I have a feeling you didn't even realize this beer came back. Oh, it's back, whatever it is, it's back. All right, last but not least, clocking it in a massive 10% ABV, we have Avery's, the Marajah IPA. Marajah. Marajah IPA. Marajah. Brewed with Turo, Aromatic and C120. It is hopped with Columbus, Simcoe, Centennial and Chinook. And then it is dry hopped. I have a feeling these might be some more modern additions with Idaho 7, Vic Secret and Simcoe. Oh, this is the kind of beer I used to go to beer festivals for. Yes, exactly. So good. That's it. It's like the punch line, you know? Oh, man. It's a good beer. It's big. It's robust. It's the kind of thing- It's rich, but drinkable. You're like, we definitely need to go, but my friends haven't finished their beers, so I'm going to get one more. The next day, you're like, I shouldn't have gotten one more. Or you go somewhere and it's on tapping. You're like, well, I'm glad I ubered here. Yes. Oh, man. I think this beer is a great conversation if you were to look on paper and read the descriptions of an American barley wine and a double IPA. Say, well, they're seemingly auto overlap. What's the difference here? The drinkability and level of attenuation here is pretty unbelievable. Yeah. For how massive this beer is, and it still has more complexity, but it's dangerously drinkable. It absolutely is. The hops are like resinous and bitter, but underneath it is like orange cream, and it's so good. Yeah. There's definitely that sweet cream profile in there. Do we know, is there dextrose in here too? Because it is incredibly drinkable. Incredibly drinkable. I don't think so. Really? I didn't say that. Anyway, it has a sweetness, but it's not sickly. Never approaches it. No. But barley wine can be. Yeah. I agree with you completely, Roger. The thing that separates this is the weight and malt body from barley wine because this is easygoing as a beer of this proportion can be. Seriously. For a 10 percenter. Yeah. This is the beer that Greg would ask for a pint of it, and they would look at them like, come on. I know. So then I'm like, can I get two of those little ones? Only sniffters, man. I'll take a liter. I was like, can I get three sniffters and a pint glass? Can this go with a six pack? There's not a ton of 10 percent beers that you could drink a pint of, and you could very much drink a pint of this. I think easily. Easily. Oh, for sure. Originally, this was in 22 ounce bomber bottles. With that silly foil. Yeah. And then I think maybe they tried four pack 12 ounce glass. I don't even know. It's been a while, but this is now available in a six pack. Six pack of cans. Six pack of 12 ounce cans. I love that. We finally landed on the right answer. Yes. So. I don't know. Maybe it should come in a jug. Growler pours a Maharaja. That would be quite a night. So good. How much is a six pack of 12 ounce cans? $15.99. That's awesome. I might be drinking this tonight. It's a great beer. I'm really happy to see it back. Yeah. Also, if you're an old school beer nerd like us, and you are a fan of Avery beers, you may have recently seen Old Jubilation, their Old Ale. There's still a teeny bit of that floating around, and we should be able to get that readily available now in the winter time. I'm also bringing back The Reverend, which is their Belgian style quad. Which is also tempered. I haven't seen either of those in a while. The Reverend was awesome. I'm a little nervous. I haven't had it in so many years. I hope it's still as good as it used to be, but I have confidence. Avery, I think, is truly one of the best American craft breweries. Sure. It's been sad to see them fade out of the limelight, but there's a push as of late to get people excited about them again and get more of their beer out in the market, so pick some up. They had a barley wine, Pigs in Heaven or something like that. Hog Heaven. Hog Heaven. Yeah, that was good too. All right. Well, Greg, that was your lineup of nice resin, old school meets new school. Thank you, Roger. I am stoked that we did this. Me too. I never quit drinking beer, but this makes me feel like the beer scene is a lot less bleak. It is alive and thriving. Things are definitely improving, and it doesn't have to be just one thing. It's really nice to see breweries making varieties of IPA. Everything does not need to be old school, everything does not need to be new England. It's been really cool to see some interest in these different styles and to see breweries making something that's essentially completely new, melding some of elements of the past with literally brand new hops that just got named and hops that still Awesome. Thanks, Roger. Thanks, Roger. Yeah, of course. If you folks at home have any questions for us, Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, hit us up at comments at binnys.com. Taking your questions and- Drinking your beer. All right. Thanks for listening to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast back in your feed real soon with something really great. Until then, I am Greg. I'm Dan. I'm Chris. And I'm Roger. Keep tasting.