Whirlwind

As you can see, I've been clearing out the notebook for a while. After a flurry of once-a-day posts, I'm moving to once every few days. I hope not to fall into the once a month funk that engulfed this blog for the majority of last season. Readers have been very good at getting on my case about more frequent posting. You know what would help, readers? Send me beer. That'll get me posting more often, that's for sure.

Of course, at the moment, I'm hunkering down for Hurricane Irene, and we'll see how that goes. One of the things I've enjoyed this past week is having an excuse to pull up weather maps. I'll admit it: I'm a sucker for geography. I used to be able to spend hours just staring at a globe or a map or an atlas. I could blow a whole afternoon exploring on Google Maps or Google Earth. So Sam Adams' Latitude 48 IPA is really just pandering to me.

The 48th Parallel North is what Sam Adams calls the "hop belt," a narrow band in the Northern Hemisphere in which hops flourish. I've come down hard on Sam Adams before for their excessive use of hops, but here (in an IPA) I'm pretty open to liberal interpretations of balance.

Good looking pour.

There's a really thick head on this beer, and it laced down the glass rather attractively. There's wonderful grassiness and a lot of grapefruit on the nose, but the aroma isn't bitter the way some other IPAs sometimes are. There's actually an undercurrent of sugary sweetness in the nose, which I found very pleasant.

Even prettier lacing.

The sip was a little harder to get behind. It's an IPA, so I do expect to be smacked in the face with a pine cone. Oddly, instead of pininess, I got a lot of bitter citrus (lemon and grapefruit) and some weird tinny metallic flavors as well. There was a decent malty backbone that did balance out the beer so as not to lean toward puckeringly or bracingly sour. Nonetheless, that metal flavor was rather off-putting.

Dinner was less than thrilling, sadly.

I ate it with a dish of cold sesame noodles and some roast chicken, two flavors that should have really complemented the IPA. They didn't: too bad.