Peace Tree Double IPA

For us in Des Moines and indeed Iowa in general we're just not accustomed to beer hype.

No, we usually leave that sort of business safely some three hundred miles to the east of us. We might have gotten our first taste of beer hype this weekend. I couldn't help but get choked up watching our little city growing up when it was announced that Peace Tree Brewing would be holding an official release of their new Double IPA at Beer Crazy this Saturday. Well that's not exactaly true, I heard that the release would be at 1 o'clock, so of course I showed up an hour early to stand alone with my wife in front of the Jeroboam of Chimay proudly displayed as you walk into Beer Crazy, taunting us in all it's glory.

After resisting the charm of a comically large beer bottle, we went out to lunch to return at 2. After a quick sampling, a short talk with the owners of the brewery, and a purchase of four bottles I was on my way. No big lines, no hassle, just a few Des Moines beer lovers making the best of it buying $2.50 bottles of limited release beer. I quietly slipped away using my upmost restraint with four lovely bottles.

How was the beer?

It was wonderful, thank you for asking.

I'm not one to care more about a big beer (by this I mean high abv) than say a more standard strenth beer, but this is easily among the best I've had from this brewery. The aroma on the beer is fruity, sweet, & seems more dominated by the belgian yeast used than the hops which is weird because that's kind of the opposite with Hop

Wrangler (The IPA upon which this beer is loosely based), either way it smells good. The aroma has a distinct sweet almost floral character that works really well alongside that fruity yeasty thing I was talking about as well as the piney and citrusy hoppiness. Furthermore I like the flavor, I actually like everything I taste in this beer. It is indeed a lot like an intensified Hop Wrangler, so all the oddities of that beer are amplified here. Now when I say oddities you must understand, I mean this in the best way possible. This and the Wrangler are beers that don't jump through a hoop for you and do exactly what you want them to, but as the glass progresses everything sort of weaves it's self together. This is, I believe the concept behind these two beers and I think it's executed very well in both cases. That said I'll say a little more about what's going on here. We've got a fruitiness and a citrus character that is unmistakably from west coast American hops sort of melding along with a fruity belgian yeast strain, which I might add seems to be becoming more and more dominant with each batch this brewery uses it in. The pineapple flavor is pretty nice in this beer, now lots of times you get pineapple from a yeast or a hop and sometimes it tastes like a pineapple flavoring, or a pineapple candy if you will. This beer tastes like genuine fresh pineapple. So what, you've got a West Coast Belgian IPA on your hands? But that's not the case, I think when I first had Hop Wrangler I wished it were the case. Again with this one, these guys are going to make you think a little harder than that. Beyond all the fruitiness the beer is very bitter in a sort of herbal old world hoppy kind of way. Think of something like the biting bitterness of a good Classic German Pilsner. Then add to this all a sort of musty dank character. Theres lots going on, but everything is balanced out to where it doesn't seem messy at all.

For a 9% abv beer the alcohol is perfectly concealed and this is frighteningly easy to drink.

Cheers to Peace Tree, keep up the great work, you are exciting Iowans about beer, which is no small task!