Mikkeller In May
18. Mikkeller 10 6.9%

Now I'm a very busy man, and I'm also a very busy man on a limited budget with limited space. Single hop beers, ten of them, that'd take up a fair bit of space and cost a few bob. This may or may not have been my thought process, but when I discovered that Mikkeller had released an IPA featuring all ten on the hops featured in their Single Hop series, then I knew it was a beer I had to try. The hops are, in label order: Warrior, Simcoe, Centennial, Cascade, Chinook, Amarillo, Nelson Sauvin, Nugget, Tomahawk, and East Kent Goldings. This could be a bit hoppy.
It pours a dark orange amber with a fluffy pillowy white head that clings to the glass as is slowly dissipates. Unsurprisingly, and you probably could have worked this out for yourself, there is a big big hoppy pine and grapefruit peel aroma. There's also some spicy lemon, some orange marmalade, pineapple, mango, peach, and some herby notes too. Medium bodied and smooth over the tongue, sharp lemon, peach and orange pine are the initial flavour hits, tropical fruit caramel then comes through but this isn't the overwhelming blast that you might expect, rather it's a gently pleasant, mildly assertive wash. There's some white pepper and a citrussy sherbert dryness in the finish that lasts for some time, diminshing ever so slowly.
This is a delicious IPA but not the explosion in a hop factory that I was expecting. I don't know whether some of the hops used are neutralising each other or combining and contrasting enough to actually make quite a mellow melange. It could be a fair reflection of the single hop series, each with it's own unique characteristics and nuances, but somehow I'm left wanting something a bit more, well, hoppy.