Toppling Goliath X Hops Pale Ale (Rainbow)

The Toppling Goliath Brewing Company is in Decorah, Iowa. They make not only the best beer in Iowa, but some of the best in the entire nation. This is the last of five releases in their new X Hop series. They will each have a unique color to their label, and each color represents a new experimental hop. They encourage people who try the X Hops beers to provide their input back to the brewery. They will then try to encourage hop growers to grow more of these new hops so as to have more regular production of some of these varieties.  (See Red here and Green here and Blue here and Yellow here and Orange here). This is the mixing of all the single varieties together in one beer.

The beer pours a cloudy deep honey and orange in color. There is a tall, thick, foamy head that is off-white in color. The aroma is citrusy, tangerine and grapefruit, passion fruit, a musky funkiness, with some mango. The aroma tingles like frost in the air in a pine forest. The taste is a perfect amalgam of all of the aromas. The finish is quite bitter, even astringent, giving the effect of biting into grapefruit rind. There is then a wave of strong sun tea with lemon, then back to the bitterness. It then mellows out into an aftertaste true to the original flavors, weaving in and out with the bitterness.  The mouthfeel is smooth with a tingling carbonation in the background.

This is a subtle and sublime mix of all of the original X Hops flavors, part of each of them can be detected here, but they mostly are in a well unified whole. This has gotten lower ratings (that I have seen) than the single hop releases.  I think it has to do with this not blasting you with any one flavor, it is much more subtle (don’t confuse my use of subtle here to mean it lacks flavors, it has them aplenty, they are just are well blended into each other).

After having had all X Hops releases, I would, merely as personal preference, rate them as follows:  Green is the clear number one for me, Red second, Rainbow third, and the Blue was last.  Orange and Yellow are in a fight for fourth and fifth place that I don't think I could resolve without drinking them head to head. Keep in mind, rating these is like rating your children, you actually love them all.