The Best New Beers So Far This Year

Eno Sarris, April 21, 2016

We've been talking about the milkshake / NEIPA a lot recently. So when I ran the best new beers so far this year, I knew what was coming.

Yup. A leaderboard full of hazy (turbid?? yeasty?!) grassy fruity thick fresh IPA and DIPA from the leaders in such things. I mean, there's even one named Milkshake for chrissakes. (Check the glossary for BAR and Style+ definitions.)

Rank Beer Brewery

BAR

 Style+
1 Doppelganger Tree House Brewing Company 7.0 113
2 Bright Tree House Brewing Company 5.5 109
3 Dialed In Trillium 5.4 111
4 DIPA V2 Cloudwater 5.0 110
5 Curiosity Twenty Four Tree House Brewing Company 4.8 116
6 Punge Tired Hands Brewing Company 4.6 107
7 Passionfruit Milkshake Tired Hands Brewing Company 4.5 113
8 Super Spruce Grimm Artisanal Ales 4.5 110
9 Xtra-Citra Surly Brewing Company 4.4 103
10 Les Ronces Bruery Terreux 4.3 109
11 Make It Rain Other Half Brewing 4.2 110
12 India Pale Ale Pirate Life Brewing Company 4.2 109
13 Everybody Wants Some "Citra" Hoof Hearted Brewing 4.1 108
14 Born To Die 14.05.2016 BrewDog 4.1 111
15 Schlafly Double Bean Blonde The Saint Louis Brewery (Schlafly Beer) 4.0 115
16 Cloudberry Ice Cream IPA Omnipollo 4.0 114
17 Lumen Grimm Artisanal Ales 4.0 109
18 C.R.E.A.M. Sixpoint Brewery 4.0 110
19 Old Perseverance Avery Brewing Company 4.0 111
20 Ground State Breakfast Stout Bottle Logic Brewing 3.9 106

Doppleganger supposedly tastes like Alter Ego with the dials turned up to eleven, so if you like the orange juice IPAs, you'll really like this one. Bright is not as juicy and creamy, but it's still a mosaic Tree House. Dialed In from Trillium is "dank and juicy" and made of Nelson and Galaxy with sauvignon blanc juice added mid-fermentation so I'll let you guess how it tastes. Then you have two Tired Hands juicy IPAs -- one named Milkshake, so -- more Tree House... and even at the end you won't have to guess who farted when you have the Hoof Hearted because you're probably drinking a yeast bomb if it looks like this: 

This isn't to say the list doesn't have other things going on. I didn't like the Super Spruce, but that's a spruce-tip gose. Les Ronces is a boysenberry blonde sour ale that I must have as soon as possible. C.R.E.A.M is an amber-ish light coffee beer from Sixpoint. 

Pirate Life won Best Rookie International Brewery last year, but you'll have to go to Australia to have those. And since BrewDog's Enjoy By take is about freshness, I doubt we see much of it here. Cloudwater is in England, too. Omnipollo is Euro, but they find their way to my fridges, and if you can't find the Ice Cream, the Tired Hands Milkshake is a collabo with that fine brewery. 

But if you've had one of these fine beers, I expect it was fruity, thick, and opaque. Tis the season!