The beers of New River: Mother Earth Brewing Sisters of the Moon IPA

This is one of those beers I got at food lion about a month ago. It's from Mother Earth Brewing out of Kinston NC. As I'm sure you probably figured out from the name, it's run by a bunch of Godless Hippies. The brewery started in 2008 and had their first batch on the street in 2009. The brewery is obnoxiously environmentally friendly, if you can think of some off the wall green hoodoo, they are doing it. These people are insane, I love it, I want their beer. Fortunately I have their Sisters of the moon IPA, and if they have put in half the attention to detail into their beer as they have to not polluting the local area, I think this is going to be a good one.

It's a nice looking bottle, I like the painting with the three girls dancing in the moon. I like the symbol for the brewery as well. It looks like Hanoi Jane in the initial scene of the 1968 film Barbarella, the one where she's floating around naked. Visually fascinating film, Barbarella. Good music as well, terrible in every other respect. But I digress.

The sexiest traitor since Ethel Rosenberg

(You have no idea how hard it was to find a picture that conveyed the message I wanted but wasn't rated R)

Bottle says it has all American hopps, light copper color, intense hop aroma and strong hoppy bitterness. It is also Hoppbacked, where you have hot wort flow through fresh hopps to give the beer back the hopp oils that are burned off in the boiler. It's similar to dry hopping, but at an earlier stage and for a much shorter amount of time.

Anyways, lets pop this sucker open.

Makes a nice hiss sound when you open it, usually a good sign. Nose from the bottle is faint, but has malt and citrus qualities to it. Time to pour it into the super traditional Orion mug and see how it heads. 

oops

On initial sip (admittedly, it was all head, my fault) it tastes more of malt than of hopps. After getting down to the beer proper, it is much more bitter. They got the description of the color right, it is a light copper. Intense hopp aroma it does not have. Nose was slight from the bottle and almost non-existent from the mug. It's not really a "strong hopp bitterness", more of a mellow hopp bitterness. It's a mid bodied beer, almost no acidity. While ill described by it's brewer, it is quite the pleasant IPA. The hopp biterness lingers for about five seconds after you've swallowed the beer. I imagine this is due to the hopp oils that were re-introduced. There isn't much activity inside the mug, but there is a great deal of sediment suspended throughout the beer (there's a word for that, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is). 

 

I finally saw Hateful Eight. Another Tarantino bloodbath with a multi-leveled story. That's not to say it wasn't new, exiting, and surprising. It kept my undivided attention from start to finish, loved every minute of it. Be forewarned, it is probably his most gruesome film. It's a bit like reservoir dogs, it largely takes place in one small location, and jumps throughout the timeline of the story to give you a full perspective of whats going on, but with a bit more skill than in reservoir dogs. I like the fact that it goes back to western noir, in that, while innocent people are brutally murdered, it's not really about them. It's about evil people, meeting terrible ends at the hands of other evil people, because that's what happens to evil people. It's a fantastic, well told story and if you're not particularly squeamish you should go see it. 

 

That's it for this beer. For my final thoughts, I loved it. It was easy to drink, it was hoppy, but it didn't punch me in the face with grassy flowers. I loved the fact that the mellow flavor stuck around so long. Well done you crazy hippie earth children, well done. I give this beer my blurry seal of approval.