Harpoon Leviathan Imperial IPA
This Imperial IPA is part of Harpoon’s Leviathan series which debuted this past June. Up until this point, the only other departure(s) from their stable lineup of beers had been the 100 Barrel Series, which featured the release of a unique beer every couple of months. While these two series are similar in that both allow Harpoon to brew a limited amount of a special one-off release, the goal of the Leviathan Series is to focus on producing limited runs of beers that feature stronger, more aggressive flavors and alcohol levels. The first beer in the series was a wheat-wine style beer called Triticus. The Imperial IPA is the second in the series, and they just recently released a Baltic Porter that is the third beer in the series.
Generally speaking I’ve never been a big fan of Harpoon’s beers. Not that I outright haven’t liked them, but instead I’ve found them to be uninspiring. The beers are ok, and not really much more than that. Because of this I’ve never taken the plunge and tried one of their 100 Barrel Series beers, although some of them have definitely caught my eye. And I was going to give the Leviathan Series a pass too, until I read some good reviews of the Imperial IPA that piqued my interest. It helped that the Leviathan Series entries come in 4-packs, which I find much more attractive than a beer only released in 22-oz. bottles (as the 100 Barrel Series is). So I gave the Imperial IPA a chance, and am glad that I did.
This is a very good beer. It’s got a nice, golden red color to it. The nose is swarming with hop oils, spicy resins, hop flowers, and a light current of malt-sweetness lingering about the edges. The flavor begins with a moment of sweetness quickly consumed by hop flavor, which itself gives way to a lingering hop bitterness. These are rough hop flavors, pine, resin, and spices, as opposed to citrus and flowers. The finish is entirely hop-driven, with a slight bit of malt flavor kicking around the edges but entirely muscled out by the hops. After a while the hop bitterness fades and gives way to some residual sugars from the alcohol. The body is surprising light for a 10% beer. In fact, I might even say dangerously light – it would be too easy to drink a couple of these before realizing how strong they are.
This is one of the two things that I really like about this beer – that despite being 10% it drinks like a much smaller beer. I don’t generally enjoy beers where the alcohol plays a dominant role in the body or the flavor, and especially not when the beer is an IPA. When I earlier wrote about Port Brewing’s Hop 15 this was one of the reasons I didn’t care for it so much – the alcohol had such a strong presence in the beer that it made it almost hard to drink, and the hops and the alcohol felt as though they had been uncomfortably married into the same beer. So I was pretty happy with how the Leviathan Imperial IPA managed to subsume the solvents, fusels, and cloying sugars that are so prevalent in many other high-ABV beers.
The second thing I really like about this beer is that it makes no bones about being a beer for hopheads. The nose, palate, and finish are massively hoppy, and there is simply no apologizing for it. If you don’t enjoy hops, I just don’t think there is any way that you could enjoy this beer. I find the brazenness of brewing a beer that was so extreme in this regards inspiring. As a homebrewer, this is the kind of beer that inspires me to want to emulate its style – and by this I don’t mean style in terms of classification, but style in terms of its swagger and unapologetic-ness. Hops rule the roost in this beer, no question.
Suffice to say that Harpoon wowed me with this beer, which I think is pretty cool. It makes me happy to be able to look at one of my hometown brewers and think good things about them. So now I’m looking forward to trying the Baltic Porter the next time that I see it. Let’s hope that they continue to embrace the promise of the Leviathan Series.
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