This Is My Blood: Chief Mouser

There are so few days left in the year that I'm at the point where I'm counting beers in my fridge for the final time, making sure I have enough different beers in there to last until December 31st, and taking stock of what I do have. This means that I'm starting to say things like "This will be the last IPA I have this year." It feels like I'm signing yearbooks or something. Like, I've spent so much time around IPAs this year, and we've had plenty of ups and downs... what could I possibly say in a little blurb to sum up everything we've been through?

I just keep putting it off because, not only do I not really know how to word my thoughts kindly, but also I'm just so tired of all of this. Signing yearbooks means looking back, and all I want to do at this point is look forward, to the days and weeks ahead when I won't be constantly thinking about drinking beer and how I'm going to write about beer. There will be a day in like June when I'll get into bed and realize that I haven't thought about beer once that day. That's going to be a good day.

I'm being pessimistic, and you can probably guess why. Chief Mouser IPA is just catching me on a bad day, when I feel like the added burdens that come along with the COVID pandemic are threatening to break me. It's just so difficult for me to balance emotional health needs (seeing family) with physical health needs (not seeing family). It's a challenge exacerbated around the holidays, obviously. It also doesn't help that I'm made to feel like an asshole for even considering it a balancing act in the first place. All I want to do is sit in a room with my wife and daughters and parents and sisters and in-laws on Christmas Eve and drink some beers, and it's beyond frustrating that it's not that simple.

This isn't fair to anyone—not me, not the significant other who makes it pretty clear pretty often that she thinks I'm a cowardly asshole, not the reader for having to put up with my constant emo diversions in this blog column that is ostensibly about tasting beer, and it's not fair to Attic Brewing's Chief Mouser IPA, which deserves a synopsis separate from whatever fucked up shit and whatever intense feelings of malaise I have going on in my life right now.

But maybe you needed to know all this so you wouldn't get it crossed—I didn't like Chief Mouser, and I'm telling you now that my feelings about it are completely based on taste and not on the fact that I was drinking it in stony silence in late December.

Here's one more for the road: I'm so goddamn tired of IPAs, especially IPAs that taste like this. It's been almost a full year and I still really haven't even nailed down what specific things I like and don't like about specific IPAs out there. I concluded in June that it must be the hazy/bitter divide that informs my opinion on each IPA, but Chief Mouser is a West Coast IPA, non-hazy, and I still got that particular flavor that I don't like.

Since this is the last IPA I drink for a very long time, let's revisit the competing theory one last time. The other theory states that there is a particular hop that some brewers use that rubs me the wrong way. Attic states that Chief Mouser uses Amarillo, Centennial, and Simcoe hops in the recipe. One of these hops just doesn't sit right with me, I know it. It provides a juicy stone fruit flavor that doesn't combine well with bitterness, at least on my palate. It has a weird aftertaste. I don't like it.

I'm just tired of it, honestly. We've long since reached the point that I have established what beer styles I like and what beer styles I dislike. If that was the main goal, then I could've ended this in like August, and just enjoyed what I liked in the months since then. Instead, I'm still drinking bullshit I know I dislike and now I'm running on fumes. 

 

Maybe tomorrow we can just write about something fun, I dunno. Like, okay, how fun could this column entry have been if I had just written about the Prime Minister's official cat?

NOTES

BEER: Chief Mouser

STYLE: American IPA

ABV: 6.7%

BREWED BY: Attic Brewing Co.

LOCATION: Philly

PURCHASED AT: delivered via Attic's free service

PAIRED WITH: The Jinkx and Dela Holiday Special... it was fine

GRADE: 2 pukes out of 5

 

BEER COUNT: 532