Dry-hopped Fuzzy Baby Ducks IPA

Dry-Hopped Fuzzy Baby Ducks (cask)
1 draught pint, $8.75, 8.5% ABV

Purchased at Prime 16, New Haven

fbddhDouble Dry-Hopped or just Dry-Hopped? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter either, does it? This is my 17th New England Brewery beer review. If you are lucky enough to just have one or two of their constant rotation beers (Sea Hag, Elm City, 668), you should consider your existence worthy.

If you’ve had 7 or 8, well, you’re doing something right. If you’ve had over 15, then you’re a clown like me and have made some fairly extraordinary effort to achieve this level of awesomeness.

And if you’ve written fairly lengthy reviews of those 15+ NEBCO beers then, well, now you’ve crossed over into Loserville, population: Me.

I’m just kidding, of course. I know CTMQ is not about beer made in Connecticut. At least it wasn’t for its first 6 years. But now I’m sort of obsessed. I know no one reads these pages and in fact, their existence annoys many CTMQ fans. Why am I wasting time writing about the casked double dry-hopped Fuzzy Baby Ducks IPA, available only for a few hours a year only at the Prime 16 NEBCO Tap Takeover instead of another stinkin’ historic house museum?

Fair question.

Because I can, that’s why. Sure, some of my beer reviews are boring and I have never pretended that I’m any sort of expert here. But I’ve had a great deal of fun learning about beer in the year since I started doing these “Connecticut Beer” reviews. And, more importantly, I’ve met some great people along the way.

From brewers to brewery owners to beer bloggers to restaurateurs and bar managers. And you know what? It’s a pretty cool little community. A real nice bunch of guys – some women, sure, but mostly guys. They are active and helpful on Twitter, they will pick up a rare bottle for you in a pinch and heck, they’d probably drive you home if you enjoyed the beer somewhere a bit too much.

And here’s something else I’ve learned in this first year or so of doing these beer reviews… craft beer bloggers and writers and fans support their local breweries through their wallets. With joy. Why does it seem that the food bloggers (flogger) community does the opposite? Their modus operandi seems to be, “Me, me, me, Free, FREE, FREE!

Dry Duck 2Hey, floggers, let me enjoy my Fuzzy Baby Ducks and you can chew on some Double dry old duck.

Here’s a picture of a dry old duck

It disgusts me. When I go to NEBCO or any of the other local breweries, no one is there incessantly tweeting @ the place they are standing in and demanding free beer. That’s probably just never happened. In Flogger World? It happens daily.

Pathetic.

Regular Fuzzy Baby Ducks IPA is a citra-hopped perfect beer. Simply perfect. It’s also rare, as citra is hard to come by and NEBCO only brews it once or maybe twice a year. This cask dry-hopped version is the super-rare beast made for the Prime 16 Tap Takeover event in New Haven. Take a cask of FBD, throw in a bunch of citra hops, let it sit for a while, serve cold.

Boom.

To my taste, it’s a cool gimmick but really not necessary. The extra dry-hopping leaves the already flattish beer a bit greasy and too resiny. Sure, it hops an already hopped up beer, and citra hops are great smelling AND tasting, but there is such a thing as too much of good thing.

This, I believe, fits that bill. Mind you, It’s still an incredible beer and getting a pint of it is like winning a scratch off (getting pints of the later-in-the-night offerings are more like Powerball), but it’s not mind-blowing.

Overall Rating: A
Rating vs. Similar style: n/a

Beer Advocate’s Reviews of the Double Dry-Hopped Fuzzy Baby Ducks
New England Brewing Company
NEBCO’s facebook page
Back to CTMQ’s Reviews of NEB beers
Back to CTMQ’s Connecticut Beer Page
Back to CT Breweries page

One response to “Dry-hopped Fuzzy Baby Ducks IPA”

  1. EdHill says:

    Citra aren’t that hard to come by (well maybe at the larger brewery level, but not in my dinky homebrew world). Amarillo usually is, and that’s only because most of the acreage is already bought up by larger breweries so there’s not a lot leftover for small craft brewers and homebrewers.

    Im also not a big dry hopper. I agree it can make things a little vegetal, greasy and unbalanced. Ill do an ounce or two, but that’s about it.

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