Magic Hat Brewing Co.
Burlington VT
Available: VT, NH, ME, MA, RI, CT, NY, NJ, PA
The Magic Hat Brewing Company has been pouring a performance into every bottle since 1994. In 2010, Magic Hat created the IPA On Tour program to give hop lovers a new quarterly take on the IPA style. Demo debuts as a black IPA, brewed with a combination of roasted malts and Goldings and Columbus hops.
ABV: 6.0
ABW: 4.83
Color: 50
Bitterness: 45
Original gravity: 1056
Ahh, the Cascadian-Black-Dark-India- American -Style-IPA. When was the last time an emerging beer style spawned so much controversy? (Don't answer that.) It takes a nimble hand to balance the two predominant and oft-conflicting flavors of citrusy hops and dark-roasted malt, and Magic Hat has done a relatively good job with this, one of the entries in its IPA on Tour series. The first dark glimpse of Demo should tell you it's not your typical IPA, though. Roasty, chocolate aromas rise up first and take center stage throughout, but the hops do come through near the end, and linger like a goodnight kiss.
It may be the contrasting bitterness from the roasted grains and abundant hops, but whenever I taste a black IPA I think that I’d prefer either a dark beer or a hoppy beer, rather than a combination of the two. So, while I admire the flavor crammed into each bottle of Demo (and also—being a retro vinyl freak—love the 45 rpm label), I don’t get on particularly well with the beer as a whole. That said, there are super, zesty tangerine notes cutting through the nutty, bitter grains and I’m sure loads of people will love it.
Lisa Morrison, aka The Beer Goddess, writes about beer whenever she can and also gets to talk about it on a weekly radio show in her hometown of Portland, OR.
Author of the Good Bottled Beer Guide and The Book of Beer Knowledge, Jeff Evans is an eight-time editor of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide and one of Britain's best-known beer writers.
