Here’s what you Need To Know:
This is a near-perfect fresh-hopped IPA, best one, in fact, since Deschutes immortal “Hop Trip”.
It is balanced, complex, fruity, prettily bitter, and damnably easy to drink. Look for it. Get it. Drink it. Love it.
Here’s my bottom line on the new “Iowa Bar Fight” Fresh Hop IPA from Double Mountain Brewery and Solera Brewery of Hood River, Oregon…
Iowa Bar Fight is not only the best wet-hopped ale I’ve found since the heyday of Deschutes “Hop Trip”, it is also, with zero exaggeration, one of the most delicious, crazy drinkable, replete, well-crafted, and flat-out compelling IPAs I’ve sampled in the past ten years.
Those who read this website will have possibly seen my take on winemakers who prattle on about “nuance and subtlety’, both words that are easily interchangeable with ‘”stingy and underrealized”. And judging wine, with its inherent subjectivity, offers plenty of wiggle room for someone who wants to rationalize miserly wines to hide out. But subtlety and nuance ARE real attributes of many beverages, from kombucha to Bourbon, and tasting a liquid that shows real subtlety is shockingly easy to sort out from stingy.
Double Mountain/Solera “Iowa Bar Fight” is one of those rare drinks that shows that nuance. Tiny background flavors arise during its time on your tongue and are just emphatic enough – there’s that subtlety – for you to pick out easily. Fleeting flavors of stone fruit and various citrus notes share space with a lovely spiciness and lead to a truly wonderful blast of the hallmark tangy bitterness of the fresh Strata hops used to make this. Strata imparts a type of bitterness that suggests “dank” but over-delivers on a mouth-watering pine/spruce edge that deftly balances out any suggestion of excess sweetness, while flashing citrus fruits and wildflowers and Mediterranean spices in a sweet whisper. The Strata used here does exactly what hops have traditionally been coveted for: it yanks back the natural malt sweetness to a knife-edge balance with bitterness and creates the marriage of those two that lies at the heart of beer.
What we never know, in tasting a successful beer like this, one that shows some tiny miracles in flavor and texture, is how much of that was just a happy accident and how much was carefully planned and adroitly executed. In the final result, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether or not you enjoy the beer. But my own experience with these two breweries STRONGLY suggests that this outcome was carefully conceived and then masterfully executed.
There are now 10,000 breweries in this country, the most at any time in our history. And each one of those usually makes at least two IPAs a year. Simple math: 20,000-ish IPAs. Any brewery has to really Accomplish Something to stand out at all. And “IPA”, as a Thang, allows comparison across stylistic guidelines. Bar Fight is a bit hazy, so a comparison with the NEIPA is apt. It is definitely a product of its West Coast environment, so West Coast IPA is a valid comp. And it is fresh-hopped, so that works, too. And taken as any of these, I think this is one of the best PNW OR American IPA-style beers made in several years. I absolutely HATE it that this is a seasonal because it will be GONE soon and IPA geeks won’t drink it after it’s been around for a few weeks. I fervently wish it could be made year-round. But that’s just me whining. It’s available NOW and you should seek out and drink some NOW and I plan to pester both Double Mountain and the criminally under-exposed Solera to produce something very much like this on a more-than seasonal basis. Maybe it’s just as simple as making a single-hopped, whole-cone Strata. Whatever. I’m going to Oregon this week and I plan to go on safari to find this beer. And I think, if you taste it, you will do the same.
The Pour Fool 