I know that many feel like IPA’s are overrated. They’ve become the scapegoat of the craft beer industry for some reason. I’ll admit that I used to hate them as well. The first one I had tasted like an overload of hops just to try and cram as much hoppy flavor as possible into a beer to bump up that ABV. I was always more impressed by taste over ABV so it took me a few months to get accustomed to the flavor of a “traditional” IPA, but once I did, this style of beer quickly became my goto at any brewery for a long time. Within the past couple of years, here in Colorado I started to see Hazy IPA’s start popping up in a lot of local breweries.
Hazy IPA’s were loaded with citrus and typically Citra and Mosaic hops. The look of the beer itself reminded me of the Orange Strawberry Banana juice you could get at the grocery store. The taste itself also had some juicy tones to it but nothing overbearing, just enough to cut out some of the hops. Hell, hazy IPA’s were one of the primary reasons I thought it would be difficult to quick drinking alcohol altogether.
I’ve seen Just the Haze in my local grocery store a few times and was interested to try at some point but I was still drinking alcohol at the time and my goto was a tallboy double IPA from a brewery in Buena Vista, Colorado that always trumped this bad boy. Well finally, I cut out alcohol and my father brought this on a weekend trip so I finally got to try it. Now, I had only been off of alcohol for about 3-4 weeks at this point but this brew easily took the top position. Could I tell it was non-alcoholic? Yeah, but the mix of Citra, Mosaic, Sabro, and Cascade hops and White wheat malts, it went down smooth and reminded me of all my favorite Hazy IPAs. I could taste the hops but the citrus and wheat tones just put this guy over the top with a flavor that excites me about the future of non-alcoholic craft beer.
It’s hard to find non-alcoholic beer full of this much flavor. No matter the process by which brewers typically use to remove the alcohol from the beer, the flavor typically suffers as well, thus creating a lackluster craft brew that arguably took longer to perfect than an actual craft beer. Sam Adams has done a great job pushing out an above-quality NA brew that is not only affordable(~$10 at my local store) but the flavor profiles are perfected and has quickly become my go-to for any situation or meal pairing.