BrewDog El Dorado – Beer Review – Brew in Review

Name: BrewDog El Dorado

Style: Single Hop IPA (India Pale Ale)

Country: Scotland

ABV: 6.7%

Beer description: This beer is part of BrewDog’s IPA is Dead series which showcases four different single hops IPA’s from four different continents.  In this case, the hop, El Dorado, is from the U.S.A.  Single hopped beers are a great way to show off a hop but can often be difficult. Some hops are great for aroma, others for taste or bittering.  While there are hops out there that are considered versatile, and single hopped beer doesn’t allow for any flavour interaction and the hops don’t have any buddies to lean on!

The aroma here is a straight mixture of malt and bitterness.  There’s some biscuit/caramel and vanilla in the malt, some stone fruit, and then the bittnerness.  There’s also a musky earthiness about it that gives a surface to everything.  There’s a certain amount of sourness as well, a kind of moldy orange peel smell; it’s hard to tell if it’s unwelcome or good and very much up to taste.

The taste of the beer is citrus driven.  It has a tangy freshness to it.  This goes well with the extreme amount of malt in the beverage. The malt can be felt and tasted and works really well with the citrus.  There’s a general vibe of tropical fruits too, and it’s an all in all fruity feeling beer.  The bitterness isn’t really noticed in the overall chord, but it begins to build up about a quarter of the way through the bottle as it builds up at the back of the throat.

The body feels a little on the thick side.  It’s not as bad as with the Dana, but it’s a bit on the malty and thick side.  As mentioned in other reviews of the IPA is Dead series, this beer is packed with a bunch of malt, and, in most cases in the series, the hops is having a lot of trouble competing.  The Goldings and the Waimea did and a better job in this malt versus hops fight than this one.