Parallel 49 Rye The Long Face Imperial Rye IPA: This beer is brewed in Vancouver, BC at a strength of 8.5% abv with 86 IBUs worth of Chinook, Simcoe, Amarillo and Centennial hops. It uses both rye and barley malts to give it some different characters to a typical IPA and was just released a couple weeks ago.
Aroma and Appearance: It pours a golden amber colour with three fingers of foam and an average level of carbonation. The aroma is quite sweet, with rye dough, caramel, bits of tropical fruit and some lychees in the mix.
Flavour: The malt profile is initially fairly sweet, with lots of caramel on the tip of the tongue followed by passion fruit and tangerine tropical goodness. In the middle of the beer, the rye malts shine quite nicely, carrying some of the juicy fruits into the rye bread and toffee flavours that eventually transition into a grapefruit citrus bitter finish that has an incredible herbal aftertaste.
Overall Impression: A good and fairly balanced rye ale, pretty easy drinking for it’s strength and a good use of rye with an interesting hop profile.
Rating: Very Good at 7.5 out of 10, one I recommend trying while it is fresh.
Food Pairing: I think this would pair nicely with some sweet glazed meat, like the Cola Meatballs for example.
This brewery is notorious for making unusual, stand out, sometimes cool looking, sometime butt ugly labels like this one. They manage however, to make a splash on the shelves and the beer is very easy to spot, so in essence it works quite well for them. Here’s a link to the designer’s Facebook page with some examples of their other art which is stylistically similar and worth checking out. This particular post is a poster they made for a local Comic Con tie in bar special.
West Coast Beer Geek 