Grove Stand DIPA

Beer’d Grove Stand DIPA
1 growler, $3.75, 9.2% ABV

Purchased at the brewery, Stonington

grove standSomehow, someway I’ve created a tiny little subset of CTMQ readers who like these beer reviews. This is fairly remarkable to me, as I tend to write too much on each of these pages and I sometimes hardly even talk about the beer in question. Think about that: People read my beer reviews even though I don’t spend the bulk of each review talking about the beer.

This tells me a few things: There are people in this world who still enjoy reading and the TL;DR thing is for idiots, people are probably somewhat bored of the cookie-cutter beer reviews plaguing us now, people enjoy the fact that I am not afraid to drop an F-bomb on a crappy beer, and people sometimes like to learn backstories of things like beer names or brewer peccadilloes that I’ve come to learn.

Regardless, it’s pretty cool. As a result of this modicum of trust I’ve built up after a year or so of banging out these reviews (mostly at work during boring conference calls or some downtime, by the way), I felt comfortable naming my top breweries of 2013 on Twitter. I slotted Beer’d in 3rd, behind NEBCO (duh) and Willibrew. Now a month after doing so, I’m still very comfortable with that top 3.

I remember when Beer’d first came to beer, I probably rolled my eyes a little bit. “Beer’d?” I thought, “How cute and hipster.” (I’m kind of a prick sometimes, if you haven’t gathered that already.)

As it turns out, Beer’d IS cute… but certainly not hipster. Aaren Simoncini, the (yes) bearded whiz responsible for the beer itself, IS cute. In a burly sort of way. His wife, Precious is named Precious. And I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone who lives up to their birth name more than she.

Other than my stripper friends, of course.

And I’ve lots of stripper friends.

Beer’d Says:

Predominant character of pineapple with subtle notes of tangerine.

There’s really not that much “subtle” about Grovestand DIPA. And, for the record, there’s nothing “cute” about Beer’d’s beers either. Aaren does not mess around, not shying away from making several different DIPA’s in a New England world where Heady Topper and Gandhi Bot reign supreme.

We all win.

BYqz8TsCcAEnhLH(Speaking of cute, Precious makes these little facial-hair things for people to enjoy at the brewery. So… yeah. Cute.)

The Grove Stand was a little heavy with the booziness that knocks it down a notch from the Headies and Bots of the world, but it’s still a fantastic beer. (As in an A vs. an A+.)

This is an extremely tropical DIPA. I circled back with Aaren because I was so curious about the hop schedule of this bad boy. Ahtanum, Nugget and Zythos. Not your usual lineup, but a great one nonetheless.

The Ahtanum brings the citrus-zest character and the Zythos is full of tangerine, lemon, grapefruit and pine. Boom. This beer has all of that in spades. My palate happens to LOVE grapefruit/citrus/tropical DIPAs with a hint of pine. Like, I’d drive all the way to Stonington and buy growlers of it if I… Oh wait, that’s exactly what I did.

And what I will continue to do.

Because Aaren is so damn cute.

Overall Rating: A
Rating vs. Similar style: A+

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One response to “Grove Stand DIPA”

  1. Chris says:

    This was my #1 new CT beer of 2013. I was amazed and confused by it. It had such delicate flavors for such a big beer (9+%??). I’ve been into Beer’d since the beginning but this peaked my interest even further. Then on my last trip there he really blew me out of the water with Weight of the Sound (pun intended) and Sojourner.

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