Ölbeat 027: Anderson Valley Hop Ottin' IPA

Brewery: Anderson Valley Brewing Company
Country: United States
Style: India Pale Ale
Abv: 7,0 %
@RateBeer

Hoppy brew for the moose... not!

Anderson Valley Brewing Company, founded in 1987, is a craft brewery in Boonville, California. It is one of the 20-or-so craft breweries in the States that existed at the time. Started with a 10-barrel brewhouse in the downstairs of the brewpub, the brewery expanded in 1996 to a 30-barrel brewhouse and reached 15 000 barrels per year. In 1998 they stared another expansion, and in 2013 they produced 45 000 barrels per year. Hop Ottin' IPA is one of the legendary brews from the brewery, so it wasn't hard to pick it for tasting.

What about the beer?
Colour is cloudy rusty orange with medium natural white head. Aroma has fresh grapes, plum and citrus. Taste begins with dry and bitter hops. Then you get heavy pine and grapefruit with a tiny hint of sweetness. Palate turns bitter again. Aftertaste is dry, bitter and long.

Aroma made me expect something fresh and fruity. Instead I got something dry, hoppy and piny in the taste. It wasn't a bad deal, but filling the fruit gap would have made this fine brew an excellent one.

Ölbeat

Since craftbeer - and especially West Coast IPA - in the States seems to be a modern classic, I reached out for those two elements in music. I turned to hip-hop genre and California, and picked the first option that showed up, since it was the best:

2Pac feat. Dr. Dre: California Love (YouTube)

From the 1996 album, All Eyez on Me, the song was written by 2Pac and Dr. Dre. It contains a sample from Joe Cocker's Woman to Woman (1972), and the chorus "California knows how to party" was sampled from Ronnie Hudson & the Street People's West Coast Poplock and is sung by Roger Troutman from the funk band Zapp. The song celebrates and pays homage to the Californian wild hip-hop lifestyle, while Dr. Dre and 2Pac rap about the activities available but also warn about crime and violence present. The song turned out to be the final peak of 2Pac's career, since he was murdered by drive-by shooting in September 1996. Even though the song represents everything else than the forest lake scenery in the bottle label shows, it was the Californ-I-A in Hop Ottin IPA that locked my choice.