Epic Hop Zombie:

Hello one and all and welcome back to another great little beer review and this time, we include zombies!  Yes friends, we here at the beer review institute realize the need to incorporate ALL creatures of horror and since we have touched upon a vampire, a demon or two, gargoyles, and a few animals/human hybrids, why not a zombie?  After all they are huge in popular culture right now so what the hell, let’s hop (HA!) on the bandwagon and join in the lemmings march with zombies in tow to the cliff of overexposure.  Today’s beer is from a nice little New Zealand brewery, Epic, and it is their Hop Zombie, a brew that uses classified hop blends (you ever notice it’s always something classified that leads to zombie breakout).  The beer pours a nice clear golden color with a thin white head of foam that leaves some areas of lacing but nothing serious and a nice nose of medium bodied citrus notes and some pine resin.  The beer’s taste is pretty uniform with the only variation being on the levels of hop notes that you get with most of it building on the mid-tongue after a smooth start and finish with a good solid- though not strong- hop back-end and aftertaste.  Going into this beer I was expecting something that would blow me away hop wise but really it didn’t and while I enjoyed the beer, I wasn’t blown away but then I learned a nice little bit of information.  Here in ‘merica, we are building ourselves into a hop arms race among the craft breweries and while that is good in some respects, it isn’t what the rest of the world does and they seems to keep their hops in more manageable yet still very respectable levels.  Hop Zombie is one of those beers that is a good beer to drink if one is inclined to expand their hop horizon beyond the contiguous borders of ‘merica.