Black Abbey Tennessee IPA

I recently gave a Texas brewery a lot of flak for declaring that their beer was a particular style endemic to their state. I really need to do no less for Black Abbey for deciding that they were going to come up with an IPA that is distinctly Tennessean. I suppose it's possible this particular beer will have something that is uniquely from Tennessee. Maybe this is made using some kind of local corn like the whiskey does? Maybe its aged in barrels that Jack Daniels is made in? I am sure the second is not the case, and I suspect and hope the first is not. Maybe some local barley? That'd be okay.

The beer pours a slightly hazy dark yellow with a head that comes out just enough to let you know it's there but not so much that you need to worry about overfilling the glass. The fluffy pillow that it descends to is just about exactly what anyone could want from carbonation in a beer. There is very little to no lacing going on along the sides of the glass, and that would typically indicate of relatively low hop content, but the aroma has distinctive hop aromatics above a solid grain.

First sip is unbalanced. The front end is sweetened with the grain malt (that I could be convinced was made originally from corn grains) but the backend becomes dry and bitter very quickly. Subsequent sips will probably tone this down quite a lot, but the first sip is what we judge things on for this paragraph, so this is in need of some tweaking. All told, if this is a new kind of IPA, it should definitely not be sipped.

Tip-in is moderate carbonation burn with sweet grains and fruit rinds. The middle sends flowers to the roof of the mouth so hard that they seem to be entering via the nose while a solid, flowing mix of grains travels underneath. The finish is once again very dry followed by a wave of bitterness that turns to much heavier bitterness for the trail off.

Bottom Line: It won't be starting any new fads.

1.75/5