Founders Devil Dancer Triple IPA

Brewed By: Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan 
Purchased: Single bottle (12oz) from a 4-pack bought at Friar Tucks in Urbana, IL; 2012 

Style/ABV: Imperial IPA/Strong Ale, 12.0%

Some people just want to watch the world burn. And some people just want to watch beer drinkers pucker when they drink beer. Tonight I'm looking at Founders' Devil Dancer "Triple IPA."

Founders is the holy grail of Michigan brewing. Based out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Founders was founded in 1997 and produce some of the best beer in the world.

This beer is described as a "Triple IPA," but falls just out of the typical guidelines with a huge ABV. As such, this beer sort of blurs the lines with a Barleywine/Strong Ale/Old Ale. If you check out the Devil Dancer page on Founders' website, you can get the breakdown of this beer. This beer is described as being massively complex, with a huge malt character that balances out an insane amount of hops. Clocking in at 12% ABV, this beer packs an impressive 112 IBUs. This is one hoppy beer! It's also a malty beer, as you might guess with a beer that pushes the ABV up to 12%. Let's put this into a glass, and see how it stacks up.

Founders Devil Dancer Triple IPA

The beer pours a hazy reddish/orange color, with one-finger of thick, off-white head. The head is made up of tightly packed bubbles, and has a slight red tint. As I swirl the beer looking for alcohol legs, I get lots of lacing from the sticky head. Once the head slowly pulls off the glass, you do see some legs. In bright light this is a murky, juice-like, reddish/orange beer, with lots of visible carbonation in the form of small bubbles.

The aroma on this beer is super sweet, and surprisingly malt heavy. It's also quite juicy. I'm getting big sweet, bready, biscuity, caramel malts on the nose. I'm also pulling out juicy citrus, and huge resinous citrus. This beer is incredibly resinous and dank. I smell pine, resin, ROSIN (for a bowed instrument), bitterness, and some grapefruit and tangerine. There is also a hint of wood.

Whew! Up front on my first sip, I'm getting a lot of bitterness, and a lot of dry woodiness. Huge pungent and resinous pine cut through the palate, with ultra bitter grapefruit rind notes hitting your tongue head-on. There's a lot of malt sweetness in the back, and I'm getting lingering sweet bread. And there is some alcohol heat on the back end, with some warming. There's some pull towards a sweeter citrus when the hops gel with the malts, and you get some candied orange notes, as well as some biscuit/honey. This is dank, with an earthy/musty/tobacco thing, more so than a sharp resinous taste. There's a salty/lemon component as well.

This is a really big beer. The alcohol is huge at 12%, and the bitterness is equally large. This has a full mouthfeel, and has the potential to be smooth with nice carbonation, but ends up incredibly chewy and turbulent thanks to all the wonderful bitterness. Palate depth is great, with moderate complexity for the style. Up front is a blast of caramel, biscuit, honey; mid palate is a huge cut into woody, lemon, grapefruit rind, pine, and huge bitterness; the back end is tongue-lashing bitterness, super dry, lingering grapefruit rind and lemon...and then you get some warming and malt in the back, back end.

Rating: Above-Average

I'm feeling a Strong Above-Average rating on this beer. This is really good stuff, but for whatever reason, it seems to be missing that dazzling trait that elevates it into something truly divine. That's just my opinion though. The cool thing is...this beer is malty. I plan to age one or two bottles of this like a Barleywine, and I'm really curious to see how that turns out. This has a really sweet malt profile on the back end, and I dig that. Anyway, to me, this drinks like an Imperial IPA with flairs of a Barleywine. It's an intriguing beer, but it's getting cute at 24 bucks a 4-pack. I would buy it again, and I would drink it again, if only for that nice, sweet, malt backbone. Food pairings: pizza, a burger, strong cheese.