Widmer Brothers Brewing Co.'s Rotator IPA: X-114

Earlier this week I almost broke my Wednesday night tradition of Obannon’s.  Not intentionally, I sort of just forgot.  As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been distracted by school.  Instead of getting ready for a night on the town, I was getting ready for a productive next day.  I look at it like this though: the more work I put in now in school, the more return I receive after I graduate.  Besides, I love being a student.  I love learning new things, and I especially love learning new things about beer, or relating my ag. economics study to the beer world.  I’m talking about viewing the entire marketing chain through beer goggles: from initial grain production and input pricing, to sales and marketing of the finished product. 

This is about as simplified as the chart gets

One trend I’m very happy to contribute to is the decommoditization of beer.  The growing realization, that beer is not a beer is not a beer, and that each different beer is one of a kind. Big beer companies can buy their grain in bulk because their inputs are all standardized grains.  They buy X million tons of barley, X million tons of corn (or rice) all at predetermined prices, and then begin their process.  This is lunacy to craft beer brewmasters.  The subtle differences between grains from one field to the other means something to these small brewers.  Little tweaks make big differences to flavor.  Actually, most breweries buy grains already malted because they lack resources to malt the grain themselves.  Every single bag of malt they purchase is different than the one sitting next to it, individuality on the smallest scale.

They only look all the same

The same definitely goes for hops.  Macrobrewers contract to purchase the same amount of hops, grown as uniform as possible, from batch to batch.  At the same time, craft brewers are searching, all over the world, for something new.  Some brewers, like Rogue, have even established their own farms to gain more control of the entire process, ensuring their quality standard is applied throughout production.  This pursuit of excellence has led some brewers to keep experimenting, funding research into previously nonexistent new hop varieties.  Widmer Brothers Brewing Company dedicated an entire brew to this experimentation.  The new hop was the X-114 Citra, the new brew was the Rotator IPA: X-114.

X-114 (the beer) is an American IPA dedicated to the Citra hop.  Allegedly, it’s the first in a series of IPA releases from the Widmer bros. (the Rotator series) and it’s actually supposed to be finished with at this point in the year.  Due to a large enough demand, they decided to brew a bit more and do a quick re-release.  I guess Obannon’s was lucky enough to receive a few kegs because they put X-114 on the tap for last Wednesday. I hardly ever pass on the opportunity to try either a new or rare beer, so I ordered one.

My glass of X-114 produced about a finger of thin white head.  It was hard to distinguish the color of the brew in a dimly lit pub, but as far as I could tell the beer looked like a brownish copper with great clarity. 

X-114 smelled and tasted of light grapefruit and strong citrusy hops.  I can’t think of a more fitting name for the Citra hops, because it was easily the most citrusy hop I’ve ever been able to distinguish.  There was also a bit of that summertime wet grass note. This beer wasn’t bittering like many other IPAs, or any other strongly hopped beers period.  It did finish clean and refreshing, which fit well in this late summer season.

I’d rate Widmer Brothers Brewing Co.’s Rotator IPA: X-114 4 out of 5.  It was a good example of citrus heavy ale, I did enjoy drinking it, but it wasn’t spectacular, and it wasn’t at all what I expecting.  It seemed a bit watered down and soft for an IPA; it also might have been too citrus oriented and could have used more of a sweet malty backbone.  I hope the next beer in the Rotator series is a little more balanced, but I am willing to give it a shot.