Bend Hop-Head Imperial India Pale Ale

Top Tastings 2011, Beer sellers: The Beermongers

ABV: 9%
Origin: Bend, Oregon, USA
Website: www.bendbrewingco.com

Bend Hop-Head Imperial India Pale Ale

My trip to one of the US’s top craft beer cities, Portland, Oregon, in Autumn 2011 could easily have accounted for half my Top Tastings of the year, but to spread things out a bit I’ve limited myself to a few outstanding and representative beers. This is one of them, an amazing West Coast hop bomb that also manages to be seriously complex. It originates from a brewpub overlooking the Mirror Pond which, with the surrounding Drake Park, provides the scenic focus of the town of Bend, on the Deschutes river. Deschutes is also the name of one of the US’s most successful and impressive craft breweries, a near neighbour, but the beers produced by Tonya Cornett and Ian Larkin at the much smaller Bend Brewing hold their own in terms of quality.

Hop-Head is brewed as an autumn seasonal, and I tasted it on draught at one of Portland’s leading specialist pubs, Belmont Station, which doubles as a beer shop. The beer is a clear golden colour with a persistent white head and an aroma packed with resins and esters – pear, apple and pine. The rich palate burrs with hops, revealing layers of coconut, citrus, apricot tart, toast, pot herbs and even a bit of meatiness and smoke, with a slight alcoholic burn and an almost meringue-like sweet and pasty note. That apricot fruit persists in a finish which soon develops a massive peppery, chewy, pulpy and resinous hop attack, but the delightfully complex fruit steers you through it. One of the examples of the style that I’ve enjoyed the most.