Was it fair of me to make you wait a whole week to tell you about my best beer of Craft Beer Cares? Probably not. Is this beer worth the wait? Absolutely.
Stone Brewing Company has a bit of a reputation. Way back in 2011, Beer Advocate readers rated Stone the number 1 All-Time Best Brewery on Planet Earth (kind of them to recognise the quality of moon beers). Since then, Stone is regularly cited as being among the best of the best when it comes to craft beer. So when I saw a Stone brew on the Craft Beer Cares menu, it would have been remiss of me not to give it a try.
Aha Mojay is a New England IPA, so I was expecting it to have a punchy bouquet. Still, I was taken aback at just how great this aroma bomb smells: passion fruit, green strawberries marmalade all vie for pole position in my nostrils. Just leaning in and sniffing this beer is a delight.
But beer is meant for drinking, so let’s move on. There’s a peach sherbet fizz on the palate, along with marmalade sweetness and the tingle of bitter peel, and a hint of gooseberry tartness. The flavour is incredibly well-balanced with the beer’s body: almost milkshake creamy with the amount of wheat. The malt shines on the finish, along with more of that green strawberry note from the nose.
I was taken aback by how well this beer went down. So much so that I was back shortly after for a second, as was Oli when he’d had a taste. If I’d discovered just this beer at Craft Beer Cares, it would have been a day well spent. 5/5
