It's Like I'm Having The Most Beautiful IPA and the Most Terrible Nightmare At Once

The details: Evil Twin Brewing It's Like I'm Having The Most Beautiful IPA and the Most Terrible Nightmare At Once DDH IPA, 10.5% ABV, 80 IBU, served in a pint can

As a child of the 70's, my entire childhood was sans internet. I had only the tiniest idea of what some sort of computer network could be when I graduated high school; at the time I had only one friend that had a dial-up modem (one so old you actually had to sit the handset on it - from a rotary phone) and I'd only seen the thing in action once.

When I first got to W&M there wasn't internet everywhere. We had to sign up to get these strange analog boxes to hook to your dorm phone and your computer, but it wasn't quite a modem because you could still talk on the phone at the same time. The college had painfully few of them, and no one on my entire floor ever got one. By the time I was a junior, however, the college had wired the entire campus for ethernet, and even at 10-baseT it was AMAZING. 

I remember spending hours on hours downloading everything - music from Napster, desktop wallpapers, clip art, and fonts - so many damn fonts that none of us would ever really use but they were so fun to have. Come to think of it, I think that I still have some of those vintage fonts to this day; they've moved from computer to computer.

This week's great label design learned what we didn't for a long time - sometimes the best fonts are the ones that come stock on your machine, and once you pick one you stick with it as long as you possibly can. Brooklyn based Evil Twin Brewing picked that font (I'm pretty sure it's called Chunk, but it looks like an old stagecoach font) and took it to the extreme - the fifteen word title extreme.

In all seriousness, It's Like I'm Having The Most Beautiful IPA and the Most Terrible Nightmare At Once is a really good label. The simple repeating pattern of wavy lines is both interesting as a 3-D effect and for drawing your eye down the label. There is very much a lack of text on the label; you get only the information that's important and none of the BS (note that the graphic above doesn't take into consideration the shape of the can - you can't read the production words or the warning/barcode when looking at the name). Also interesting to note, the canning date on the bottom includes the words "not a pastry stout." I have no idea what that means, but the owner of Evil Twin is the actual twin of the guy that runs Mikkeller and apparently they hate each other.

But let's not forget about the beer. It's a DDH IPA, so you already know what to expect. It's a hazy, opaque beer that starts off really sharp and even smells a bit funny, almost like it's sour but it's a grapefruit type sour not a gose type sour. That quickly mellows into a nice orange-esque sweetness that finishes much better. It stays a little sharp tasting, but I think that's just the 10% ABV coming back to haunt the beer. I would drink another one of these if I had it, even if I think it would put me to bed for the night. If you see it, check it out.

The verdict: 4.25 out of 5 (on Untapp'd - follow me @slownumbers to see what I'm drinking!)