Caged Alpha Monkey - CB's Brewing Company

    Caged Alpha Monkey is an American India Pale Ale brewed by CB's Brewing Company which is located in Honeoye Falls New York. The bottle's tagline reads that this is a "bold, East Coast animal that throws hops at you!" This beer was donated the Amulets and Ale by Emily Hohman.

    The American IPA pours somewhat hazy, bright copper color with around a finger of white head. The head leaves a slight lacing down the glass as the beer is consumed.

    Caged Alpha Monkey smells very hoppy with noticeable malt undertones. The hops aroma contains a mix of citrus and flowery tropical fruit with a little bit of pine resin.

    The beer is medium bodied and moderately carbonated. The beer finishes mostly dry with a little bit of oily resin left coasting the mouth. At 6.5% ABV, there is no noticeable alcohol character.

There are much worse things than hops that the monkey
could throw at you...

    Caged Alpha Monkey is very bitter. From the beer's aroma, I was hoping that there would be great, fruity, flowery hops flavors in the beer. Instead, there is solely overpowering, piney bitterness. The malt profile is almost non-existent, so the bitter hops are free to run wild amongst your taste buds. What is worse than the overpowering bitterness is the bitter and sour aftertaste that stays in your mouth long after swallowing the beer.

    The image I came up with for this beer has me thinking. Why don't we have beer zoos? Or even better, maybe we could get a bunch of different people drunk and lock them in cages while we watch what they do. You know, an interesting thing that I have noticed about humans is that generally we are okay with (joking about) doing weird things like this to each other, but if I were to even mention for a second that we get monkeys, rhinos, and giraffes drunk; PETA or some other organization would jump down my throat. For some reason, people tend to outwardly care more about animals than our own brothers and sisters. I'm not really up to the task of figuring out this bit of human psychology at the moment, but it's definitely an interesting issue to think on.

    As anyone familiar with this blog knows, I am a huge fan of hoppy beers. Unfortunately, Caged Alpha Monkey falls into a category of IPAs which I have called "novelty" IPAs. These beers seek only to compete on a bitterness level. Breweries attempt to see just how much heavy hitting hops bitterness they can pack into a normal beer for some sort of non-existent "beer cred". Nobody wins with beers like this. They are horribly unbalanced, they are off-putting, and nobody would ever buy them more than once for any reason other than "hey Billy, try this!" and then laughing at his face when he tastes it. It isn't just the "odd" breweries doing this either. Even some of my most respected breweries have at least one beer which falls into this novelty category. I really wish that they would just stop.

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