Dogfish Head Aprihop
By John & Dad on August 17, 2008 @ 6 PM (1 Comment)
In yet another Thursday night Father and Son Beer Love review, we decided to try the Dogfish Head Aprihop, especially after seeing some good notes about it on Twitter. Our other experience with Dogfish Head was their 90 Minute IPA, which we really enjoyed – the Dogfish Head Aprihop is actually an IPA as well. I’ve done some other Dogfish Head beers as well (we recently had a Dogfish Head night with the Charlotte Beer Club Meetup) and I can say this with confidence about Dogfish Head: They know what the hell they’re doing when it comes to good beer.
We picked up the Dogfish Head Aprihop at World Market for $1.89 a bottle. Dad and I used an American pint glass for the review and registered a temperature of 57 F, which may have been a little too warm (more on that below). This one weighs in at 7% ABV.
On our initial pour we got a large 2 1/2″ foamy off-white head that dissipated quickly and laced fairly well in the process. The carbonation is about medium on this one and the body is a clear sparkling amber/orange color.
The first whiff gives you a lot of fruits, malts and hops. For the aromas we got a mild caramel, some generic citrus, floral, a slight resin, peach, sherry and of course loads of apricots. This is an apricot beer after all. The taste is also big on apricots and hops. The flavors don’t stray too far from the aromas, continuing with the mild caramel, some orange on the initial taste, mild grapefruit, a dry sherry and again with the apricots, which remain the biggest part of the flavor.
The initial flavor notes are a moderate sweet and a light to moderate bitter that slides in the finish to a light sweet, moderate to heavy bitter, light saltiness and light tart. There’s a lot going on here in your mouth with this one. There’s not really much body lacing as you drink it. The finish is average to long in length, the mouthfeel is oily, the tongue hit is on the back of the tongue and on our patented malt to hop scale it comes in – guess what – somewhat hoppy. We marked it two clicks to the right of balanced on the hoppy side. You’d expect nothing less from an IPA after all.
For our bottom line notes – we say yes to drinkable and repeatable, yes to memorable and yes to buy again. We mark a no for balance (needs a few more malts to balance out the hop tastes), a no for harmony and a no for wow factor (that undefinable thing that makes us say “Hot Damn!”).
As with any fruited beers there’s always a fear it’s going to taste like a wine cooler, but fear not, this tastes like a beer. It’s good, it’s refreshing, it smells great and we think it’s a terrific summer beer. This is not a bad IPA at all. Our advice is to not treat this like a regular IPA though and do it a little bit cooler – somewhere in the mid to upper 40s would probably be a pretty good starting point and as it warms you can determine where you like it best.
It’s a great outdoor beer – I had one with dinner outside one night and it absolutely hits the spot with food. Of course I tend to prefer my hoppier beers with food to help tame some of that bitter finish (not being much of a hophead personally). The 7% ABV is a really good mark and should let you easily have two. If you are a hophead, you’ll love the twist on this. Is it worth a 6 pack? If you’ve got some hot summer days ahead of you we’d say go for it.
Dogfish Head Aprihop Rating: 6 out of 10 (?)
1 Comment (Add Your Comments)
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Hey guys, I just wanted to say thanks for the link. I’ve added one for you guys also. Love the review. DFH is my favorite brewery but I was a tad bit disappointed with this brew. I really wanted a little bit more out of it. Now if you guys ever get a chance, try their Burton Baton. It’s a rotating release, this year it came out around April. You need to find it. That’s all I’ll say =)