Angel City IPA

Tonight I started with a 16oz bottle of my own Willamette pale ale, which I found languishing in the back of my fridge for about the past month. The month of cold conditioning had turned it from a hazy yellowish, slightly grassy-smelling brew into a superb English bitter.

Since I was drinking English-style beers, I thought I'd try out the Angel City IPA that has been sitting in the door of my fridge for the past couple weeks. It says on the bottle it's made with Goldings so I supposed this was an English style IPA.

The beer had very low carbonation. I practically had to pour it from orbit to get a head on it. The malt flavor was...different. I know English IPAs often have a biscuit flavor, but it seemed kind of overpowering in this beer. In terms of bitterness...well perhaps I am too used to American IPAs but I thought English IPAs were supposed to be more bitter than pale ales. This one did not leave me with that impression at all.

It's pretty much to style, I guess. But, there's absolutely nothing remarkable about it and the biscuit flavor just seems to overwhelm the other flavors in my opinion. The carbonation was also atrocious. Could have just been that batch or the bottle I got, I suppose.

Did you check the date on the bottle? It may have lost a good portion of it's hop flavor during aging.

But also, I know what you're talking about, I've noticed nearly the same flaws even in American IPAs. Shipyard IPA jumps to mind. It has a heavy biscuit flavor, along with some almost raisin-y notes, and the carbonation of the 6 pack I bought was quite a bit sub-par.

When this happens I always wonder whether I bought a bad batch or what, but I'm never willing to spend the $9-10 for a 6-pack again.

There's no date on the bottle so far as I can tell. I don't know how likely it is to be an old beer, since I bought it at the grand opening of a local BevMo a couple of weeks ago. I suppose it could have been sitting in a distributor warehouse for a while.

I really want to support local breweries and I have tried several Angel City brews and they've all been average and/or underwhelming.

I live in Iowa. There isn't a brewery I can name around here that I'd put on a national scale :x Nearly everything around here is underwhelming.

I'd love to support all of the microbreweries around here, but:
Old Maine has awful diacetyl problems. It's insanely popular in Ames (where I live), but I couldn't tell you the number of decent homebrewers / beer experts that can't stand their beer (purely because of the diacetyl problem).
Hub City has infections non-stop (a commercial brew that frequently has infections, it's crazy).
There are a couple of decent/pretty good breweries in Des Moines, but they don't bottle their beer. They're not bad, but I wouldn't consider them amazing.

Hola to a fellow Angeleno.

I'm not a fan of IPAs so I can't comment specifically on the brew but I had a couple of pints of Angel City Ale about two weeks ago. It was at an Angel City event and on tap, however. It was a $3 pint and I felt like I got my money's worth so I'm with you on the average comment. Also made with Goldings and the bitterness was (in my unprofessional opinion) within style. I hear their Oktoberfest brew is good but have never had it...

BTW, congrats on the local BevMo opening. I hope its close.

How was the carbonation on tap for the event?

weirdboy said:

How was the carbonation on tap for the event?

Click to expand...

It was normal. But of course you can control carbonation in a keg system much better.