Sierra Nevada Hoptimum

Holy shit this stuff is great!  I’m washing this beer down with a spicy roast beef sandwich at Bier Thirty, and I gotta say, the burn of the sandwich is having a hard time keeping up with the bitterness of this beer.  I ordered it as my drink of choice after doing a taster of it, followed directly by a taster of the Elysian Immortal IPA.  The Hoptimum was so powerful, I couldn’t even taste the Immortal. 

I hopped (aren’t I punny) over to the Sierra Nevada brewery website so I could learn a bit more about this beer, and holy hops, I was not expecting what I found.  First, at a 10.4% alcohol content, this beer is far stronger that the 7.2% Torpedo that I drink at home.  Second, this beer was hopped, dry hopped, and torpedoed.  That explains the 100 IBU this beer comes in at, compared to the 65 IBU rating for their Torpedo extra IPA.

The website goes on to talk about all of the hints of flavors of fruit and such that this beer has, and honestly, I’ve never understood that thing about beer brewers and their notion that I need to hear things about the ‘citrus flavors’ or ‘aroma of flower farts’.  We can sum it up simply by the notion that heavy hop beers have a certain sweetness to them, not a sugary sweet, but a light fruity sweet that varies by hops type.   This beer has so many hops, after the first rush of bitter you are left to try and sort out the subtle sweetness before it fades into a clean finish.