No Corporate Beer: Creamsicle

This is No Corporate Beer, Decibel’s semi-new beer-spotting, consumer guide where we drink a beer and a then review it. Now that we’ve accomplished the drinking part of the equation, we present the review part below. 

Beer: Creamsicle
Brewery: Decadent Ales (Mamaroneck, NY)
Style: IPA – Imperial/Double
8.4% ABV / 60 IBU

I like my DIPAs like I like my death metal: Brutal, old-school, elemental, a punch to the gut (just substitute hops for blast beats here, this analogy is already getting unwieldy). DIPAs, like death metal, also kinda resist innovation—once you get to the double/imperial/triple stage, it’s all about catering to hopheads with that upfront blast. I was 100% prepared to neg this based on the goofy ingredient list and a preconceived notion that this would just be a forgettable cream ale masquerading as an DIPA, but you know what? Decadent’s Creamsicle is absolutely wunderbar.

Creamsicle features three types of sugars—Turbinado (typically used to make simple syrup for cocktails), Muscovado (a darker, more molasses-like sugar) and coconut—incorporated into the brew, plus whole vanilla bean and orange zest. The result is not cloyingly sweet and smells like an IPA (due to the Citra hops, which add a little bitterness) but tastes faintly of an orange creamsicle, which is a pretty ingenious and elemental way of arriving at that particular flavor palette. Overall, the orange is fairly muted here, with the dominant flavor of toasted marshmallow. But, like, in beer? Hells yeah, this shifts the paradigm. Stay puft, Ponyboy. Stay puft.

More more info – and a future type 2 diabetes diagnosis – check out Decadent Ales here.