On the Road Again - 21st Amendment Brewery in San Fran

The one thing about my parents moving out to San Francisco is that going to visit them was WAY better than going to visit them in Los Alamos. San Francisco - you can see professional sporting events live, eat a lot of great food and hang out by real bodies of water. Los Alamos - you can watch professional sporting events on TV, maybe check out a movie and hang out...at the house. This last trip, before heading to the airport, we stopped at the 21st Amendment Brewery right near Giants stadium.

The first brew I had was the Double Trouble Imperial IPA. Whenever I can find an IPA with over 100 IBUs, I gotta try it and this beer comes in at 120 IBUs and a 9.8% ABV. Yikes! Fortunately, this was a masterfully blended beer. The hops go extremely well with each other, providing an extremely smooth taste with that sharp bitterness one would expect from a potent double IPA. The hops were very fragrantly fruity and enjoyable to just smell. Of course, you want to drink the beer, so can't just smell it all day. The beer was really clean on your tongue, with the taste oddly on the upper palate.

Taste - 5.0/5.0 - Wonderfully blended hops, deliciously smooth, lingering flavor, clean but sharp hop bitter taste
Smell - 4.5/5.0 - Fragrant fruity hops
Appearance - 4.5/5.0 - Nice solid head, amberesqe color
Feel - 4.5/5.0 - Smooth in mouth, lingers to back of mouth, clean on tongue (more on upper palate)
Drinkability - 5.0/5.0 - This beer was delicious - just dangerous to have a lot of.

The Monks Blood was the follow up to the Imperial IPA. This brew was extremely tasty, offering a nice blend of caramel, coffee and malt flavors with a medium body. With 35 IBUs, this beer has a hint of bitterness, but not much. The head was lacking on this one (sad face), but the color was a rich brown. You can smell the malt on this one, but it lack any alcohol scent, which was nice. No aftertaste on this one, you can expect the taste to be sharpest on the tip of your tongue, then fading as it goes down your throat. Be careful with this one, as it weighs in at 8.5% abv.

Taste - 4.5/5.0 - caramel, coffee, malt, oat - very tasty, medium body
Appearance - 3.5/5.0 - no head, but nice rich brown color
Smell - 3.5 - malty with oats - no alcohol scent
Feel - 4.0 - no aftertaste, taste sharpest on tip and middle of tongue
Drinkability - 4.0 - good beer, would definitely get again.