Around this time of season each year a few things start happening - March Madness gets into swing, I start feeling congestion and itchy eyes from my allergies, and Spring seasonal beers start appearing. Two of these three things make me happy, but I'll leave it up to you to consider the odd man out. So while I was out considering what brew to pick up for this week's review, and cursing the trees for spewing their venom in my face, all of this sort of dawned on me and I decided to pick up a bottle of Dogfish Head's Spring seasonal beer - ApriHop.
This is a beautiful beer to pour; it has a dark, but clear, copper coloring and a much more aggressive head than I anticipated. Even at a nice, steady pour the head billowed to a fluffy three finger height that had an attractive muffin top. I waited for a few minutes to allow it to dissipate some before diving in for my first sip. Dogfish describes ApriHop as a fruit beer for people who don't like fruit beers, and I can see exactly where they're coming from. Aroma and initial taste is citrusy, but not overpowering, hops. ApriHop mellows out on the back end from the malt and apricots used in brewing, but is not really what I would call sweet. This might be one of the most well-balanced beers that I've tried. It's even balanced in it's description - Dogfish Head says it's an American IPA, but also describe it as their fruit beer for hopheads. A beer that bucks classification systems, I like that.
You don't taste it, but at 7% ABV it has a little kick to it, and the 50 IBUs shows you what I mean by well balanced. ApriHop receives good praise in general from the reviewers at Ratebeer.com and Beeradvocate.com with scores of 93 and 86 respectively. One of the raters compared it to Magic Hat #9, but better...I tend to agree with that opinion on this one. You should be able to find this around town through the month of April, and I would suggest trying it if you never have.
My allergies are really going to start kicking in soon; so follow me around and listen to me complain on the Lville Beer Facebook page, Twitter account, Foursquare, and I might even post pics on Pinterest. And as a parting gift, here's our friend Sam from Dogfish talking about ApriHop.
