F-11.1% Jet Red IIIPA by Hope Brewery

This week’s beer comes from a blog regular: Hope Brewery from the Hunter Valley.  However, in a bit of a change of pace, for the first time in quite a while, this Hope post will not be about one of their awesome sours.  This time, it’s their massive F-11.1% Jet Red IIIPA.

Let’s get it out of the way right up front.  This is a beast of a beer.  It is massive in both flavour and booziness.  It definitely flirts with the line of being a bit over-the-top in the latter department.  But at the end of the day, I loved this beer.

It starts with a rich red flavour.  It’s a red that’s much closer to caramelly than roast-y on my super technical red-beer-spectrum.  Then as you just start getting your tastebuds around the caramelly-ness, you’re blasted with the dual impact of the booziness and the hoppiness.  Both are massive punches to the chops (in the best possible way).  If I had a slight criticism, it’s that, as mentioned earlier, the booziness does flirt with being a little bit too much.  It comes close to overshadowing the rest of the beer.  But if you buy a beer with ’11.1%’ not only on the can, but in the name of the beer, that’s something you do kind of expect.

It’s so far beyond your normal brew that it took a couple of sips to re-calibrate my taste buds.  But once I got a taste for it, I loved it.  And if I’m being honest, that’s probably largely because it reminded me very strongly of one of my all-time favourite beers: Last Rites’ Puddle Maker.  I would still rank Puddle Maker slightly higher.  But falling just short of Puddle Maker still makes this an excellent beer in my book.

This is very much a ‘not-for-everyone’ beer.  But for me, the F-11.1% Jet Red IIIPA definitely ticks all the boxes. And it’s one I suspect I will be hunting down again.