Dogfish Head 120 minute IPA = YUM!

I mentioned in a previous post that while Drew and [m] were away at the neuroscience conference in Atlanta I went to a Dogfish Head tasting at The Local Dough. All I can say is wow. Before I was introduced to this brewery out of Delaware I was kind of a snob about beer not from the Pacific Northwest and was hard pressed to admit that any American beer not from Oregon or Washington could be as good as a Rogue, Bridgeport or Deschutes. Well Dogfish Head has made me completely abandon this snobery. The highlights of the tasting include the 120 minute IPA. Dogfish Head describes this as: "Too extreme to be called beer? Brewed to a colossal 45-degree plato, boiled for a full 2 hours while being continuously hopped with high-alpha American hops, then dry-hopped daily in the fermenter for a month & aged for nother month on whole-leaf hops!!! Our 120 Minute I.P.A. is by far the biggest I.P.A. ever brewed! At 20% abv and 120 ibus you can see why we call this beer THE HOLY GRAIL for hopheads!"


It is currently on limited release but one of the Dogfish Brewers loves Arizona (go figure) so we get more of the their beer than many other areas of the country. My words are inadequate at describing how much I love the 120 minute IPA. Another highlight was the Chateau Jiahu, which was a beer they brewed from a 9000 year old Chinese recipe obtained from DNA on pottery. It was much better than I had been expecting considering that, "In keeping with historic evidence, Dogfish brewers used pre-gelatinized rice flakes, Wildflower honey, Muscat grapes, barley malt, hawthorn fruit, and Chrysanthemum flowers. The rice and barley malt were added together to make the mash for starch conversion and degredation. The resulting sweet wort was then run into the kettle. The honey, grapes, Hawthorn fruit, and Chrysanthemum flowers were then added. The entire mixture was boiled for 45 minutes, then cooled. The resulting sweet liquid was pitched with a fresh culture of Sake yeast and allowed to ferment a month before the transfer into a chilled secondary tank". YUM! Who knew that molecular archeologists could be so useful.

They were also selling $2 pint glasses and my friend Bethany won me a T-shirt by making 4 golf puts into a pint glass. My own aim was off that night.