Beer mail! That’s always a fun thing. There are, of course, several ways that you can do this, trading beer with friends through approved shippers and/or buying beer from brewers or stores that will ship it. For my part, I have a select few friends that I will trade with, and one of them is the Beer Professor himself, Dave Coulter.

In fact, I just got one the other day, and the first beer that I popped from that package was Fat Head’s Hop Stalker Fresh Hop IPA. This is only the second beer that I’ve tried from this Ohio brewery, but as we shall see its world-class and even better in my opinion than the first one I tried (Fat Head’s Trail Head Pale Ale).

Fat Head’s has a number of IPAs, but they say about this one on the can label:

Deep in the Yakima Valley, our hop-obsessed Head Brewmaster went commando in search of his prized nuggets. His mission: capture the freshest hop flowers he could sneak up on. Then he wet-hopped this bad-ass brew for a deliciously dank IPA. Out of the wild emerged The Hop Stalker.

Fat Heads Hop Stalker Fresh Hop IPA has an alcohol content of 7% by volume and an impressive 80 IBUs. I would like to tell you the hop varieties used, though I suspect mostly classic American West Coast hops. Apparently they change them up periodically, at any rate they just list the hops as “Varies” on the website. My can is freshness dated and stamped as canned on 10/14/14.

Fat Head’s Hop Stalker Fresh Hop IPA pours to a hazy yellow orange color with a thick rocky head formation and a really and truly huge citric orange and grapefruit plus resin nose. Indeed, I could smell it a few feet away while I took pictures! Taking a sip this beer has a huge caramel malt body up front, I say really huge and able to stand up to all those amazing hops for a little bit at least. That battle is lost though and the hops are just brutal in their resiny pine tar, citric grapefruity and bright orange juicy assault. A long dry bitterness of epic proportions rounds out this truly perfect IPA.

What can I say, except a delicious, massively hopped classic American IPA. I was certainly glad it came in 16-ounce cans rather than 12, and I was very, very impressed. It’s a beer that would be a staple in one of my beer fridges, if it were sold here in Georgia. And I still say the Fat Head’s guy looks like Oliver Hardy…..

Home