Memory and craft beer make an interesting duo. To have a beer once, really enjoy it, and then have it again for the second time years later is rarely the exact experience one is expecting, namely because our taste buds, along with the beer market itself, experience such rapid and dynamic shifts. There are so many different factors that can play into the experience changing from the first time to the second: Taste bud adjustment. Change in ingredient availability. Change in consumer tastes and expectations. The slow encroach of unreliable memory.
I know this to be true, because I’ve experienced how much things change, even when I know the beer has stayed the same. The process was heightened to the extreme in the first year I started really getting into craft beer, back in 2007 or so. From the beginning of that year to the end, my taste buds underwent a radical adjustment to say the least. Things that I perceived as unbearably bitter at the beginning were perfectly pleasant eight months later. It’s amazing how quickly our senses can adapt and adjust.
It’s because of those experiences that I can draw special pleasure from those few times when things haven’t changed in my mind, and that’s the case with Half Acre’s limited run pale ale, Tasty Waves. It’s a beer that was first brewed back in 2011, while I was working in newspapers in Illinois. I remember picking some up during one of my many trips up to Chicago and thinking it was one of the best simple, crowd-pleasing pale ales I’d had. Now, tasting the limited run again four years later, that opinion hasn’t changed: This is still some really good stuff.
Not that I’m really surprised, mind you. Chicago’s Half Acre is good at several things, but hops are really their forte, much in the same mold as Three Floyds right across the border. Both breweries work in the medium of hops like Renaissance painters, wringing the best, most vibrant expressions out of each variety. They’re two of the best makers of hoppy beer in the Midwest, so it’s no wonder they’ve collaborated several times on making IPAs. It makes perfect sense.