This is slated to hit the shelves nationally on the 6th (Monday), and at first blush—it’s rather interesting and actually not bad at all. I’ll be drinking more and writing up review notes for it this weekend sometime.

(And no, I don’t automatically turn my nose up at macro-brewed brands remember—I’m a beer geek, not a beer snob, and I’m always interested in trying new beers—whether from A-B or the newest nanobrewery down the street.)

Some details from the press release:

The newest full-time addition to the Shock Top family, Shock Top Wheat IPA is a unique hybrid style that brings the refreshment and smoothness of a wheat beer and marries it with the crisp, hoppy bitterness of an India Pale Ale (IPA).

To create the new beer, brewmasters started with Shock Top’s signature recipe, adding citrusy Cascade and Magnum hops and dry hopping the beer for several days to give Wheat IPA the rich, hoppy aroma that is the signature of IPAs. Containing 5.8% alcohol by volume (ABV), Shock Top Wheat IPA will be sold nationwide in six- and 24-packs of 12-ounce bottles and on draught.

Which interestingly puts it at about the same level as Deschutes‘ Chainbreaker White IPA (just recently announced as the newest year-round addition to their bottled line-up).

More soon.

As in the past, the package came in large, handsome wood box filled with shredded used coasters for packing material. They also included a prepaid packing slip to make it easy to send the box and material back, which is fairly forward-thinking (the previous two packages also did this).

(Sorry for the sketchy photos, apparently my camera(phone) work needs work…)

These both sound like exciting beers to try, so I’ll have reviews and notes posted soon.

This is Deschutes’ Imperial IPA, ostensibly called their “Experimental IPA” that clocks in at 8.5% alcohol by volume and 95 IBUs. It’s “experimental” because Deschutes usually plays with the hop formulation in order to squeeze every last bit of hoppiness (not just bitterness) into this beer (previous years have seen such efforts as adding hops to the grain mill while crushing the grains for the mash).

And I already drank one of the bottles, split with friends on New Year’s Eve. Remembered impressions: “danker” than previous years—or, for those that dislike the adjective “dank”—more of a wet cannabis aroma to it. And it tastes pretty darn good.

The Abyss is officially released on November 15th, three weeks from now. I imagine I’ll be drinking this before then.

The four beers are:

• Brothers’ Reserve Lemongrass Wheat Ale, a 9% wheat wine brewed with lemongrass and Muscat grapes
• O’Ryely IPA, the last Rotator IPA series beer brewed with rye
• Barrel Aged Brrrbon ’11, a 2011 release of last year’s Brothers’ Reserve Barrel Aged Brrrbon under their new Alchemy Project
• 2010 Barrel Aged Brrrbon, the Brothers’ Release vintage of the beer, intended for a 2-year vertical tasting with the ’11 Brrrbon

It’s an impressive lineup, but I’m most excited about the Lemongrass Wheat, I think that will be tasty (along the lines of the super-impressive Cherry Oak Doppelbock).

Three bottles of delicious Hop Trip—and notice that this year, they are in 12-ounce bottles and not the 22-ounce bombers of previous years. I think this will make Hop Trip a bit more accessible since it’s available by the six-pack; regardless, I know what I’ll be drinking this weekend.

Their Fresh Hop Mirror Pond Pale Ale, which I believe is the first fresh hop beer other than Hop Trip that the Brewery has bottled.

I’ve been excited about this beer since Bill Night over at It’s Pub Night started talking it up the last couple of years as the best fresh hop beer out there… in fact this year he wrote, “The last couple of years, Deschutes’ fresh-hopped batches of Mirror Pond have been so good that I can’t shake the feeling that it is the best beer anyone in history has ever been privileged to taste.” (Okay, perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but since—up until now—Fresh Hop Mirror Pond was brewed and only available at the Portland Pub I haven’t been able to refute it.)

Aside from the high praise from Bill, there’s another reason to be excited about this beer: it uses heirloom Cascade hops. This is not just a figure of speech; this is from the letter that accompanied the bottle:

But this creation went far beyond just ordering some Cascade hops from the rich farmlands of Oregon — instead, Brewmaster Larry Sidor revived the original 1972 rhizome for the plant from the archives at Oregon State University.

“We are in the craft beer industry and we care about quality, which is why we asked the hop farmer to keep a field idle for two years — we actually paid them not to grow anything,” said Sidor. “This gave us a ‘pure’ field to start with, using cuttings from the original Cascade hop plant and we grew them up for more than two years.”

Goschie Farms of the Willamette Valley agreed to dedicate four acres of pristine land for heirloom Cascade hop cultivation.

Frankly there’s almost nothing about this that doesn’t flabbergast me on some level. The original Cascade hop from 1972? Holding a field empty for two years, then waiting at least three more years for the hops to fully mature?

Stan, are you paying attention?

As anxious as I am to try this beer, what’s amazing here is the packaging: a fairly heavy-duty wooden box that was “created using reclaimed wood from Portland, Ore., and the packing material is made out of recycled coasters.” I am encouraged to reuse this box, or optionally send it back to Widmer for future use (they provided a return shipping slip to do so).

Inside the box were two bottles of Falconer’s IPA and a Widmer Imperial pint glass.

Saranac Pale Ale, IPA, Pumpkin Ale, and Octoberfest. Obviously the one I’m most interested in is the Pumpkin Ale…

So let’s cover a little additional disclosure regarding these beers: though based in Canada, the overall company is in fact owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev (via Labatt) and these three beers are being brewed in the U.S. at A-B’s brewery in Baldwinsville, New York. And I haven’t open any of them up yet to taste and review them.

That being said, I think the Facebook “virtual tasting” and live chat was extremely well-done and smart idea in this age of “new media” and internet marketing. The video feed worked well, it wasn’t too polished or over-produced (having a better grassroots feel to it), brewmaster Graham Kendall was interesting and engaging and he answered quite a lot of the live chat questions that came in—even the inevitable ones about Anheuser-Busch, extreme beers, and so on, which I think he answered very well.

I’d like to see this sort of virtual tasting done more often, though frankly it may still be the purview of big marketing budgets only (although there’s really no budget required for a webcam-equipped laptop running Skype).

As to the beer, I’ll report as I taste them myself (I didn’t taste along with the virtual tasting as we had a end-of-year school function to attend). The three beers look to be fairly straightforward, mainstream styles to enter the market with, so there shouldn’t be any surprises.