It’s going to be very difficult to follow up last night’s beer, so instead, I’ll continue with the review that I interrupted before embarking on that particular Expedition – tonight, I bring the Dogfish Head Aprihop to the table. There’s a soft spot in my heart for Dogfish Head, and there really isn’t one that I don’t like (well, maybe one…). Will this one meet or exceed my expectations? Let’s find out!

Dogfish Head Aprihop IPA - Hope you like the glass from the Double IPA festival!

The first whiff of this beer is different, but nothing spectacular. Dogfish Head certainly doesn’t leave much to the imagination with the title – you smell apricots and you smell hops, but not much else. It looks like a darker IPA, but thicker, oranger, murkier, and keeps an actual head on it. For a beer with “hop” in the name, I expect hops and a lot of them – this beer is particularly mediocre in that regard, especially for DFH. The taste, unsurprisingly, is primarily fermented apricots, but it also combines the alcoholic taste of cooking sherry with the delightfully medicinal taste of Flintstones chewable vitamin pellets, a flavor which I can confidently say is unique to the Aprihop. The main nose is more apricot than hops, though it’s tough to knock them for telling you exactly what to expect! Aprihop has a silky smooth texture reminiscent of canned peaches – it’s smooth, viscous, refreshing, and pleasantly chewy.

Aprihop is a fun beer, and is yet another fine product worthy of the Dogfish Head moniker, although it’s certainly not their best. With its many descriptive nouns and adjectives, the Aprihop is a great beer to pre-party with. It’s not strong, it’s very easy to enjoy, and it will certainly relax you before before you move on to beer pong and kegstands. I would definitely prefer a hop aroma to the apricots, but I’ll take what I can get – you can’t win them all!  Great job, Dogfish Head, and keep up the great work! I had to go out of my way to find this one  – I picked this one up at the Bottle Barn in Santa Rosa, CA during my last beer run, and they had crates of it for about $7 a 6-pack.

Update: Dogfish Head contacted me about this review and informed me that the bottle I reviewed was very likely skunked – DFH only releases the Aprihop once per year, usually in March. Since I purchased this bottle before their usual release date, I probably got a bottle of the 2009 batch. I recently picked up a 4-pack of the recent batch, and it has definitely redeemed itself. My review is pretty spot on – the beer is hoppy and candy-like, with peach and apricot flavors. It is very fruity, and most assuredly does not taste like vitamins! I’ve also seen this one everywhere, and it’s readily available at most liquor stores.

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