This IPA came highly recommended by a guy down at Acland Cellars. It also came with a similarly lofty asking price. I really don't want to fill up the remainder of this challenge with cheap imported lagers, which was the easy option, so I decided to bite the bullet. The beer comes with an epic blurb on the bottle, which really is so long and outlandish there is no point trying to lay out an abridged version. Let's just say that this beer is Stone's liquid poem to the glory of the hop!
Thus, I prepared myself. 7 or 8 months ago such a ludicrously hopped beer would have left me broken and bruised, lying on the ground drowning in a pool of bitterness. My developed appreciation for the little green flower has allowed me to developed a tolerance now, and I am better able to deconstruct the different elements of the beer rather than just reel in horror.
The Ruination claims that it is so overhopped it will ruin your palette, thereafter rendering any other beer too boring to consider. The IPA pours a cloudy peach colour, looking somewhat ugly but attractive at the same time. Interestingly the cloudiness dissipates rather quickly. As described, the taste is akin to a battering ram breaching through the door to your taste buds. The bitterness is immense.
Incredibly, after you begin to fine tune your senses like the knobs on a transistor radio, everything starts smoothing out. The crackling distortion fades, and clarity is found. For what is basically an avalanche of hops and a bee's dick of malt, the beer is ingeniously balanced.
At the start it was maybe sitting around an 8...8.5. But this is a 9. I'm not going to rate anything perfect, but it is thereabouts as close as anyone is going to get.
9/10
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