Widmer Brothers Pitch Black IPA:
Greetings and salutations friends and neighbors!  Welcome to another day of beer and today we explore a familiar beer with a twist.  Now in hunting for beers for this little endeavor, I have noticed that there about many more IPAs out there than anything else.  They come in different variations ranging from time amount hopped (90 and 120 minute….drool) to number of times hopped to blends and collaborations.  Well now we have color variations too, gone is the cloudy blonde/orange, replaced with a licorice black color and a new twist on the category of beer.  Widmer Brother’s Pitch Black IPA is my first venture into the world of Black IPA’s and apparently it’s a growing world. My last trip to the adult beverage store showed at least 2 other forms of this IPA out there but I was sticking with just the one that I have for the time being (well, that and the fact that I have somewhere around 60 IPAs in the beer pantry right now).   Sporting 6.5% ABV, this one runs about middle of the road as far as ABV goes in IPAs.  No idea how it pours since this was drunk straight from the bottle - Hampton Inn doesn’t stock real glassware- but the nose is what you’d expect with a nice hoppy nose that blends smells of citrus and earth into a nicely rounded smell.  The beer taste is a combo of a mildly hopped beer with touch of a silky stout and the back end of a strong pale ale.  The front of the taste is citrus with a bit of bite that is smoothed out nicely by the carbonation and a roasted malt flavor.  The back-end comes alive with skunk and a heartier bite that I can remember from some IPAs but find a lot more in pale ales.  A delicious beer, I do like it and I am willing to try some others that are out there to compare and try to find yet another IPA that I enjoy.  Man, I thought the whole purpose of this “challenge” was to find different beers, not variations of the same.  Oh well, could be worse; I could be trying variations on malt liquor all year.