Thursday 1 December 2016

State of Mind Session IPA - Advent Calendar Day 1

Up front, I need to say that Collective Arts Brewery is currently one of my favourite craft brewers, mainly because of their wonderful "Ransack the Universe" Hemisphere IPA. I went into this knowing they do good work.


This is their session IPA, called "State of Mind", in 500 ml can format. 4.4% ABV, 38IBUs. As with all of their beer, the container is adorned with one random picture from a series (you can view the gallery of all the series here). Each type of beer they do has a collection of several dozen pieces of art, all done by different, fairly unknown artists. The art looks better on the cans than on the bottles. I almost feel bad putting them in the recycling container.


The beer itself is definitely a winner. Cloudy pale yellow with a light head, and gorgeous aromas of white flowers, white grapefruit, orange rind, pine, white pepper, and lemon. The taste is crisp and clean, mostly white grapefruit and pine with nicely balanced hops.  I tend towards higher alcohol IPAs, but this session brew is a definite winner, especially for a hot summer day. It would also pair quite nicely with white fish in lemon sauce, or shrimp in a green curry sauce.

What a great start to my 2016 "Beer Advent Calendar".

1 comment:

kanatanewf said...

Glad Day 1 was well-received. Only 23 more left to go!