Southerners have a lot to be thankful for. Boiled peanuts. Fried chicken. The Allman Brothers…The list could go on infinitely. Personally, I’m thankful for collard greens, the word y’all and Donald Trump. Ignorance has never been this much fun to watch! He’s like a character from a Coen Brothers movie. I’m also thankful Donald Trump isn’t from the South.
But what I’m really thankful for is all the damned IPAs there are to choose from at my local bottle shop. The choices are staggering, and I’m just talking about breweries operating below the Mason Dixon here. Every time I walk through the doors, I find a new IPA to try. First, you have all of the new breweries that are popping up with fresh cans and bottles to try, so it’s tough to keep track of all those new labels, but then so many tried and true Southern breweries are reinventing themselves with new, bold twists on this ancient style of beer.
Look at the two beers in that picture. Just when I thought I knew Blue Mountain and had them pigeonholed they come at me with this citrus bomb. Blue Mountain does a killer flagship pale ale, but this new beer is a different animal altogether. It smells like Sunny Delight and pretty much tastes the same way. Awesome.
And I had discounted Red Brick altogether because of some bad draft beer I had in Atlanta a couple years ago, but then I found this IPA at the store and was blown away. It’s also a citrus bomb, but not in the sweet juicy way that Hopwork Orange is. The citrus comes from the hop bill and is far more nuanced. And these are just the most recent IPAs from Southern breweries that I picked up. There are dozens more out there. Nay, thousands more. So yeah, we have plenty to be thankful for in the South.
