Midnight Sun Cohoho Imperial IPA Review

Midnight Sun Brewing of Anchorage, Alaska brew a crazy number of excellent beers. Cohoho is one of their Christmas beers, it’s a malted and Christmas-ized version of their favorite Sockeye Red IPA.

Cohoho, with its Coho Salmon in the Santa hat, pours reddish brown with a cream colored head of fine foam that stays. It smells of caramel malts, white pepper, floral hops, and perhaps some orange zest. The taste is an IPA with floral Cascade, Centennial and Simcoe hops, citrus, and spice on the roof of my mouth. There’s also malts, lots of malts, that give the beer good body and depth beyond the hops. I get a resin aftertaste that reminds me this is an Imperial IPA. Honey, brown sugar and juniper berries are brewed in, but I’m not picking up those individual flavors. It’s a big hoppy beer, with a malt covering. It’s 85 IBU and 8% ABV.

Midnight Sun has done a great job of brewing extreme beers in an extreme climate. (That sentence is a good sound-bite, so I’ll leave it, but I’m aware that Anchorage doesn’t get a lot of snow and actually is rainy like Seattle.) The point is, they make great beer that pushes the limits. Cohoho Imperial IPA pushes traditional boundaries on IPAs in a great direction.

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    While it's difficult to picture Santa as a young man, he was once. He met the future Mrs. Claus one snowy night when she offered him a winter ale that she brewed herself. It was love at first sight - for both the Mrs. and her winter ales. With Santa's growing fame, his favorite brews became named after his favorite day - Christmas. Santa now travels the world each year to spread the joy that began in a stable in Bethlehem two millennia ago.

    Please note: I reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive or off-topic.