Hood Canal Dabob Bay IPA

Nice reddish orange color with little head. Come grain and malt on the taste. Hops are not over the top....could be higher, but still a nice drinkable beer.

Clear amber with a quickly fading beige head. It’s a good IPA but nothing about it stands out and it’s on the weaker side.

22oz. bottle. Deep reddish orange with a small white head. Cereal grain and some malty sweetness in the aroma. Applejuice, bready malt, and mild sweet floral hop flavors. Residual sweetness with some flower nectar perfumey character in the finish. Mouthfeel is medium light.

Malty banana on the nose - no hops at all. Thick, cloudy amber in color with some suspended floaties. Malty flavor with bread and sugar, some lingeringlemon flavor as well. This beer is similar to Cottonwood Endo, but not quite as good. Drinkable, and fairly tasty.

Amber bottle pour with off brown head. Nose of sweet orange blossoms. Flavor of sweet malt mixed with hops. Almost more malt than hop. Very light clean finish.

I had a dry-hopped version of this IPA a few weeks ago, the tap specifically said "dry-hopped" so it may very well have its own category soon - and judging from these other ratings it should. Strong honey coated hops are the life-blood of this beer. The hops are crisp and forthright as is to be expected with dry-hopping, but Hood Canal does a good job of backing up all those IBUs with ample malt. A good addition to what appears to typically be a mediocre beer.

(22 oz bottle: The Bottle Shoppe in Bellingham, WA) Generally, the nose is just lightly fruity and musty, with much more sour fruit if you swirl a bit. But the first taste, wow, I’m getting plenty of sour fruit, and now I can’t smell anything else but sourness. It’s still just a mild sourness, and not unpleasant, but it’s still the most prominent aroma of the nose. Also in the flavor is a modest amount of malt and hops, but they never rise to the forefront for me. Medium body. Hazy amber color. Pours with a pretty small off-white head, and it fades away quickly to nothing. No amount of swirling can regenerate any head. No lacing at all. I’m guessing this isn’t the freshest of bottles, even though I purchased it at a seemingly reliable bottle shop.

From a 22oz bottle

Pours amber-brown with a modest head and clotted bits of sediment. The aroma is reasonable if relatively mild, with the expected pine and citrus hops. The palate is a tad buttery but ultimately thin; the flavor is a medicinal hops with sweet malt, with a cough-syrup follow-through that ruins it for me.

While it’s not a disasterous beer, I am not particularly impressed with this one, and after drinking one glass worth, I poured the remain 6 oz or so down the drain.