Paper City Blonde Hop Monster

Pours a sunny-cloudy apricot orange. Lively, full, ebullient appearance. Sticky caramel aroma; heavy in wooden bitterness ; pine cones, cotton candy, pale malt, and honey. Simple in sweetness and overstretched bitterness that’s sat for a bit too long; still, once the hops have outlasted the spoiled-citrus character of immediate expiration and begun to sink into a damp, earthy woodenness, the pleasantries really do begin to resurface. That wooden quality in this style, especially when not extremely fresh, is typically quite warming and very welcome given the alternatives of sticky sweetness and old orange juice to which many examples regress; here, a touch of the tired citrus character clings a little, but the general earthiness is the substance, and that’s workable. It almost has a cannabis kind of herbal character.

Crystal malts wander in burdensomely in the flavor. Like the unwelcome do-good oversweet cousins walking in on the pot party. Pine and cannabis flavors linger a bit, and the past due citrus characteristics that seemed quieted in the aroma are pushed forward somewhat in the iced tea flavors. An apricot-like silky sweetness reenters the realm of wooden textures found in the nose, with an almost-fulsome bittersweetness. Still leaning too sweet.

Medium-full palate, softly carbonated, showing a healthy pithy and acerbic citrus bitterness toward the finish, where a crisp wildflower honey sweetness and toasty wood plainness expands; there’s pungent pulse in the distant smack that I can’t identify, but it’s bready, salty and somewhat charred-tasting. It’s hard to know whether it would have been considerably better wholly fresh; the dominance of crystal malts is really the main issue here, not the freshness of the hops, and that personal issue would likely have been just as present six months ago as it is now. Really it’s not that badly built. Thanks Mark!

On tap at Capone’s. Pours a dark/hazy orange with a relatively thick white head. Creamy mouthfeel, very sweet/juice-like on the palate. Ultra hoppy and the alcohol cuts through at the finish.

Bottle. Pours a hazy orange with a bit of suspended stuff and a thin head. Aromas of rotting vegetable and a touch of pine that becomes more pronounced as the beer breathes... gaining some grapefruit and a little bit of grass. Flavor is sweeter than I expected and the hops pine and citrus waits just a second before onset and then blends to a nice aftertaste. The second half of the flavor development is much better than the first and I liked it quite a bit better as it warmed a bit. Still, that sweetness and the occasional vegetable flavor were a little off-putting.

Light floral aroma. Hazy orange color with lots of floaters and a large white head. Lots of sticky lacing. Sweet and bitter in the beginning losing the sweetness in the finish. Alcohol noticeable in the finish. Creamy palate