Coriolis DIPA

Coriolis DIPA
1 growler, $15, 8.2% ABV

Purchased at the brewery by my man Jay, Woodbridge

coriolis dipaOnce again, I’m tasked with reviewing a beer that very, very few of you will ever get to enjoy. For one, you must live close enough to Woodbridge, CT to drive to the brewery the one time per year (as of now) they brew this ¬ within the short window of availability. (In fact, for this release, I couldn’t make it down there but my man Jay hooked me up with a fresh growler.)

So in a sense, I just feel sort of silly spending the time and energy on this knowing that you’ll never enjoy it.

But then it hit me; oh yeah, no one reads my beer reviews and the small handful of people who do are the small handful of people who can get their grubby hands on full growlers of NEBCO beers. On that note, let’s get going.

This single-hop double IPA is awesome. There. Done. Now set your iCalendar for next August and good luck getting some.

Bye.

Sigh. I’ve set myself up to never be able to review a beer like that ever again, haven’t I?

NEBCO says:

Our second addition to our single hop series, brewed with all Nelson Sauvin. Big pineapple, peach and sauvignon blanc like flavor and aroma attempt to be balanced with a bready malt backbone.

Trivia question: What was their first? Galaxy? Fuzzy Baby Ducks (Citra)? Supernaut (Mosaic)? Why, Galaxy of course.

coriI think. Anyway, in this rare case, the brewery’s description of the beer is spot-on. Yes, it’s true: This complex, incredibly drinkable (especially for an over-8% beer), double IPA does taste faintly of peach and citrus and has a unique malty underpinning that I’ve never really tasted in a good way in a double IPA before in my life. It’s crazy.

I’ve written before about how much I love the citrus-forward hops. As such, Citra brews are my favorite. When it comes to wine, I pretty much also only drink New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs, so really, there’s nothing not to love here.

Except there is. And it’s this big picture right here of the tap handle. Look at it: A dinosaur is eating a hobbit. (It is a hobbit, I promise you.) What in the world does a dinosaur eating a hobbit have to do with this beer?

I set out to find the answer through research. I knew what the Coriolis effect was and nope, nothing there. I initially thought the guy getting eaten was a leprechaun, and that path took me to all sorts of crazypeoplesites where leprechauns are real and dinosaurs were ridden by Jesus.

Those leads were promising, but ultimately came up dry.

I partnered with a fellow etymology and beerology nerd, Nikki from J. Timothy’s on this mission. One of the first things I found was a story from Nelson, New Zealand about some dinosaur fossils made while the dinosaur was hopping. Okay… we have the dinosaur, we have “Nelson” and “hopping” from Nelson Sauvin hops, which were the single hop used in this beer. Cool as that all was, it didn’t satisfy us – and we knew that wasn’t the answer.

Sticking to dinosaurs, I found a story about a dinosaur recently named Sauroniops pachytholus, or “eye of Sauron” in Greek. That comes from, of course, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, which was, of course, filmed in New Zealand where the hops for this beer came from. Promising. But we continued onward.

We moved over to music and after a few dead ends of bands with Coriolis and Leprechans and/or dinosaur songs, we both stumbled upon the answer! A few of NEBCO’s beer names are inspired by music, so our confidence soared while parsing the lyrics of “The New Colossus” from Kinetics & One Love. It all became so clear.

It’s a pretty good song and these guys, though you’ve never heard of them, have some decent street cred.

It’s all there: Coriolis, Dinosaurs, Oompa-Loompas (leprechauns) AND Storm Troopers are mentioned in the song – Storm Troopers being an obvious nod to NEBCO’s Imperial Storm Trooper Stout. Well played Kinetics & One Love, well played.

And that, my friends, is what I do with my free time.

As I was saying many paragraphs ago, this beer is phenomenal. It doesn’t supplant Fuzzy Baby Ducks as my favorite of the four NEBCO single hoppers, but it knocks on the door. It’s smooth, warming, and treats the drinker to several highly evolved flavor profiles from first smelling to finally swallowing. I don’t know how they do what they do, but damn… they do it well.

384421-jurassic_2Once again I’m reminded how lucky I am to live in Connecticut to have these guys down the road and… what’s that?

It’s Craig Gilbert, the guy who comes up with most of the NEBCO names and labels? Craig, you have something to say?

“The tap handle….well, that was a last-minute addition by the talented James. An image was needed and the idea was put out by the people working that day that there was not a lot of monumental things that hailed from New Zealand (NZ is where the hops for Coriolis are from).”

Yeah, okay Craig. We’ve got all that. James must be a fan of underground slightly subversive hiphop artists like Kinetics & One Love. By the way, the Weiss Trash Culture label art? Genius. I’m sorry, you were saying? What is New Zealand famous for?

”Nothing except that’s where Lord of the Rings and Jurassic Park were filmed.
So, naturally you get a T-Rex gnawing on a hobbit.”

Oh. Naturally. Thanks a lot Craig. Now go back to being a creative wunderkind.

Part of me is ecstatic that I now have the answer. But the other part of me is torn up inside because… Because Jurassic Park was filmed on Kauai. Not in New Zealand. (The two sequels were also not filmed in New Zealand.) How do I tell them? Will they be sore? Or will they think it’s just funny? (I’d bet heavily on the latter.)

Done? Done.

Except… Why is it called Coriolis? One would assume it has to do with the myth that drains swirl “backwards” in New Zealand and the rest of the southern hemisphere. Hm.

At the risk of piling on my friends at NEBCO, toilets and drains don’t flow “backwards” in the southern hemisphere. I’m just blowing it up all over the place here today.

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

Beer Advocate’s Reviews of the Coriolis
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

2 responses to “Coriolis DIPA”

  1. Mark says:

    C’mon man. You really needed to do all that research only to still be led astray?

    Nelson Sauvin comes from New Zealand. Lord of the Rings was filmed in New Zealand. LOTR is a film about hobbits. Beer’d Brewing Co. also has a single-hopped Nelson Sauvin beer. It’s called Hobbit Juice. I hate to repeat myself but…..c’mon man!

  2. Steve says:

    Right. The Hobbit is from New Zealand, but the velicoraptor? From Jurassic Park? Filmed in Hawaii?

    Half-stories aren’t my bag, man. I go all out.

Leave a Comment

The Out Campaign: Scarlet Letter of Atheism