Firestone Walker Mind Haze IPA
Photos via Firestone Walker Brewing Co.
When I first saw the headlines from beer blogs proclaiming that Firestone Walker was finally ready to unleash its first hazy IPA, my immediate thought was something along the lines of “wait, haven’t they already done this before?”
As it turns out: No, not officially. Firestone has never thrown its considerable weight (and street cred) behind a beer marketed as “hazy IPA,” but it’s not as if the brewery’s hoppy beer game has been rooted indelibly in the past for the last few years. Modern IPA releases from Firestone, stretching back to stuff like the first Leo v. Ursus release, Fortem, have been informed by the rise of hazier, juicier IPAs even when they weren’t necessarily reflecting them visually. Just look at the page for Luponic Distortion IPA on the website, covered in pineapples and fruit imagery, and it’s clear they’ve already been exploring this flavor territory for a long while.
Mind Haze, then, is less Firestone’s first go-round in this flavor wheelhouse and more their first real commitment to marketing a beer as “hazy.” It’s an IPA I was excited to try, given its pedigree and the fact that we love Firestone around here. What I found, sadly, didn’t exactly capture my imagination. Mind Haze is a fine, solid example of hazy IPA, but one that already seems rather familiar to me. In waiting so long to create what they think of as the perfect expression of hazy IPA, Firestone has ultimately made something comfortable rather than cutting edge. And that’s fine—but it’s hard not to be left wanting more all the same.
On the nose, Mind Haze presents very green—it certainly comes off like something that has captured a ton of aromatic hop compounds, that’s for sure. Grass and resin are initially dominant, fading into hard-to-place tropical fruitiness. In terms of profile, it reminds me a bit of Trillium’s IPAs, which I sometimes find to be overloaded with grassy characteristics to the point of becoming unpalatable.