Goose Island Brewing (AKA AB InBev), Chicago? Fort Collins?
Goose IPA
- * Skip It
- ** Good Craft Beer
- *** Well Above Average
- **** Exceptional
- ***** Top 1%
20160413 Notice that this is Goose IPA and not Goose Island IPA. This lightly feathered Goose is just 4% abv to comply with Utah’s “3.2” draft limit; the full flight version flaps up to a normal 5.9%. There’s a tiff on the net between an AB brewer, who maintains that a different mashing process allows Goose to maintain the same hop rates as the Goose Island IPA and a beer “expert” who claims that’s just impossible.
—– I can see both sides of the debate. It’s hard to imagine that you could put the same hops into a 4% beer without increasing the perceived bitterness, but there’s no doubt that brewers have learned a myriad of ways of boosting the body of a beer while still capping it at 4%. The least professional of these beers are worty and unpleasantly sweet. The best of them taste pretty much like…beer.
—–One thing we’re pretty sure of: if you’re going to drink a beer and a half of the “low point” 4% stuff for every one beer you usually drink of the regular, you’d better allocate some extra time at the gym. Reducing alcohol does cut calories in some SIPAs, but in quite a few it appears that it actually raises caloric intake.
—— Goose IPA is one of the best draft beers available in Salt Lake City. Some of the local products are quite good – and especially if you’re going to try a range of styles you’re better off with the locals. But Goose manages to disguise the sweetness without the sharp bitter that characterizes some of the SIPAs that are popping up all over. The hops taste – like Goose Island hops: west coasty and fruity. If you’re watching a ball game, which we were, and not picking the beer apart sip by sip, which we often do, you can forget you’re having a Zion reduced experience.
—– The ball park staff swore the product was hand filled into sixtels in Chicago; we can’t help noting that the much more efficient AB plant in Fort Collins, Co. is also much closer.
