Beer of the Week: Dogfish Head Aprihop

With Easter here for the weekend, I figured I should be cheesy and choose something appropriately Easter-friendly.  The obvious choice to me was Dogfish Head’s apricot IPA entitled Aprihop.  It sounds like April, it hops like the Easter bunny.  I’m all set to go. 

When I saw this beer I had a couple of assumptions formed in my head.  First, fruit beers tend to suck.  It takes a good brewer to brew with fruit and not go over the top.  Second, Dogfish Head and Sam Caglione are up to that challenge.

Before drinking Aprihop, I had an idea in my head of what this beer could be.  I know, this is typically dangerous habit, because whatever it is you devise in your head is rarely, if ever,delivered by the beer.  Regardless, I expected something light, almost wheat like in charachter, with subtle sweet apricot notes, more pronounced than yeasty esther, but similarly complimentary to the beer.  hen, I expected a big complex hop finish, this was after all a Dogfish Head IPA.

Aprihop pours a nice amber color with a thin egg-shell white head.  There are big bubbles in the carbonation which rise and fall quickly with agitation.  The aroma is rather sour, or is that the fruit?  When I taste the beer the sour flavor continues to dominate the malt.  More than anything, I get the flavor of dusty, dried apricots.  The finish is similar to the dry flavor left after eating dried fruits with a touch of grassy hop lost somewhere in there.

Aprihop proves to be a brutish apricot beer, not unlike Pyramid’s Apricot Ale but far more intense.  I’m not a fan of this beer.  I drank the entire bottle, even allowed the temperature to change, but I couldn’t find a condition at which it revealed itself to be more than what I got in my first few sips.  This beer really disappointed me.

This leads me to a final thought.  Not all beer of the weeks are ones that I like.  In this case, the beer fit a theme, and I’m the kind of guy who likes puns and tongue in cheek humor. I try and bring you news about beers that you’d like to drink, and sometimes that doesn’t work out as beers that I liked drinking.  This week, the idea fit the theme, but this is a beer I’ll be skipping in the future.