Every week, Young, Dumb and Full of Beer will highlight a different beer. Sometimes it will highlight a couple of beers. Usually they will be local, since Philly has some of the best breweries in the country, but sometimes I will throw in a beer from elsewhere. It will be nerdy, but hopefully approachable, even if you only ever drink Colt 45.

This week’s column is something of last chance alert for Victory Brewing Company’s Hop Wallop. It is a seriously amazing beer, but also only brewed during the winter - so once it’s gone, you’ve gotta wait ’til next year. I know that The Foodery at 10th and Pine still has bottles, though the Northern Liberties location has run out. Springfield Beer Distributor still has cases as well, if you feel like hoarding.

Drinking a beer called Hop Wallop pretty much instantly brands you as a douche. It’s as if you not only never left the 90s, but you were Tim Robbins’ asshole boyfriend character from High Fidelity in the 90’s. Cause seriously, beers that compete for the crown of most brutally hoppy are often undrinkable, but brewers make them anyway, knowing that some asshat will buy them in order to show off how masochistic and sophisticated they are.
So Hop Wallop pretty much has to suck. Except it doesn’t. In fact, if you’ve never had it, move quickly to your local beer store and get some now, since, as I said, it won’t be around much longer. So what makes it so unexpectedly awesome?

Two things: First, its hop flavor avoids the puckering, pine-sol taste of so many other extreme IPAs, and secondly, it is one of the most well balanced hoppy beers I’ve ever had. Instead of relying entirely on the hops to provide flavor, Hop Wallop first hits you with a wave of sweet grain, almost like what I imagine homemade cheerios would be like if they existed. This grain sweetness makes the 8.5% alcohol content barely noticeable - that’s 2 PBRs worth of booze in each bottle, for those of you keeping score at home. The next thing you notice is an acidic and spicy fruit flavor, as if you took a sip of apple-grapefruit juice to wash down your cheerios, but the sweetness doesn’t go away. And then, as you swallow, the hops finally take over, but instead of having the bitter, piney, soapy taste I normally associate with intense hops, they open up a pastoral scene of hay, flowers, herbs and just enough funky, bitter barnyard mustiness to neutralize the initial sweetness and let it finish with a crisp snap.

More Info on Hop Wallop.