Pike Double IPA

I’ve never sat under an iconic green library lamp and studied the official BJCP guidelines, and I’ve never been one to hold beer styles and definitions close to my heart. I am not a valiant defender of the descriptions we’ve used to fence the proverbial Marxian sheep into their strict guidelines, and have never suffered the revolutionary pangs of a beer unwilling to sit in one style or another. But I am a great fan of patterns and recognizing them, and am a product of an education system that, at the very least, helped me learn to love the pattern. Here’s one pattern: double IPAs are sweet. It would be mendacious of me to claim I know why or whether double IPAs are sweet. But I do know that they are regularly sweet, and it seems to be a hard habit of their’s to kick. And yet here is a double IPA that desperately lacks sugars. The Pike Double IPA is a rough IPA, and kicks like a mule on the way down, but feels much closer to a typical American IPA than it does a Double IPA. The aroma features dominant notes of minerals and a nice, crisp slice of apple, with a slightly more complicated flavor on the tongue - lots of metallic notes, lighter touches of floral hops, but an uneasy flatness in the mouthfeel and a lazy palate. The hard edge of alcohol mutes what flavors there are, leaving a high alcohol and moderately hoppy IPA with little else vouching as flavor. No doubt the BJCP guidelines say nothing about Double IPAs being sweet, and purists will bristle at my lazy dismissal of a proper review of the guidelines, but even considering that, this is a flat and unexciting beer - drinkable, yes, but featureless too.