Somewhere in Purcellville, Virginia, a brewery has decided that the collapse of society deserves a soundtrack, and apparently that soundtrack is a five-part hazy Double IPA series. Adroit Theory Brewing Company's latest is Part 1 of The Death of Civilization in Slow Motion, an homage to the Mad Max universe, loosely inspired by the Crow Fishers, a group of characters who appear on screen in Fury Road for approximately as long as it takes to read this sentence.
This being a New England-style IPA series, the apocalypse in question tastes remarkably pleasant. Double dry-hopped with Citra, Mosaic, and El Dorado, this juicy release delivers intensely tropical fruit notes with only modest finishing bitterness. Notes of pineapple, mango, and tangerine run through the whole thing, wrapped in a semi-sweet, pillowy body that suggests the wasteland, at minimum, has excellent fruit stands.
Adroit Theory has built a cult following on exactly this kind of thing, elaborate can art paired with genuinely ambitious brewing, and a release calendar that treats "new beer week" as a permanent state of being. They mentioned in this very newsletter that they drop consistently strong new releases like clockwork, and it's hard to argue when a five-part concept series is apparently just a Tuesday for them.
Available now on draft and in cans, this one launches a saga that's going to take four more releases to complete, so if serialized apocalyptic beer storytelling is your thing, you'll want to be paying attention going forward. Purcellville doesn't get much more focused than a brewery mapping out an entire fictional wasteland one hazy IPA at a time.
Civilization may be ending in slow motion, but at least it's ending with excellent hop selection.