Pang Pang: Boi Juice (Sweden: IIPA: 8% ABV)
Visual: Pale hazy yellow to lemon juice edges. Large white mounded, bubbled head.
Nose: Grapefruit. Lemon curd. Fresh. Crushed custard cream biscuits. Watermelon. Soft peach skin. Grapes. Subtle hop character. Light bitterness.
Body: Peach syrup. Oily hop feel. Pink grapefruit. Pineapple. Apple. Slight gherkin touch. Cream thick texture. Banana.
Finish: Oily hop bitterness. White grapes. Apples. Slight gherkin. Moderate hops and bitterness. Mandarin orange.
Conclusion: Oh yes, this does the job. It is slightly hazy, but nowhere near New England IPA level haze on the eye – and this tendency follows through into the rest of the beer. It burst with big fruit, but that doesn’t mean it is afraid to bring the oily hops with it.
The feel is thick, heavy and slightly oily – the full 8% of the abv is used well here to give some weight and sweetness to the beer. It is creamy and thick and gives a lot for the big flavours to work against.
The flavours, well, before we get into that let’s start with the aroma. It opens fresh with grapefruit notes – not sharp, but definitely recognisable as grapefruit – with gentle hops below and light sweeter notes. Here it feels closer to a NZ hopped beer, which is no bad thing in my opinion.
The body is a more balanced experience. The thick malt backs it giving a custard sweetness, but the mainstay is a mix of apple, peach, pink grapefruit and pineapple flavours that gives a fresh and sweet fruit burst. Here it starts getting slightly oily hop character – not heavy but it gives a nice beer feel and helps naturally progress into the finish where moderate bitterness and more hop oil character really underlines that this is an IPA.
It’s a nicely balanced beer that is full of flavor – Big sweet malt yes, but so much hop flavor that, while it starts slow on the IPA hop character it quickly becomes bigger and better. Now it isn’t perfect – it doesn’t quite stick the landing – the last third felt more leaden in the hops that the rest, becoming slightly muggy. Generally though I enjoyed the big flavours and big range on show here.
I had fun with my boi juice.
Background: Ok, I was tempted to go the Royal Virility Performance route with this one and make a set of notes full of innuendo, because, well it is called “Boi Juice”. However the actual notes didn’t quite feel right for that kind of play. I mean I could work the banana and apples all day long, with some creamy release I guess, but it felt like it would be forced. So a more standard set of notes, You may or may not consider this a bad thing. Anyway a triple dry hopped citra and mosaic DIPA. Sounds like my kind of jam. Picked it up from Independent Spirit and put on Pure Hell: Noise Addiction as backing music. Only found out about Pure Hell recently – a mid 70s proto punk band that got its only album release over 30 years later due to falling out with their manager leading to it not being released at the time. It is very cool – full punk energy mixed with a bit more virtuoso guitar work.
