Shipyard Brewing Company's Tremont Freedom Trail India Pale Ale

My first Shipyard beer. Heard a bit about the brewery, but just never ran across them.

Pours a clear, coppery amber with a very nice light tan head that gets pillowy before thinning. You can smell the hops from a couple of feet away. That may signal a loss of taste if it throws off everything it has, but we'll see. Good, grassy hops smell, but not really enough malt for an IPA.

Well, this one is hard to nail down. Big alcohol bite for some reason. Fair amount of bitterness, but again the malt seems lower than it should be. It's there in the body, but not the taste, for some reason. It should be a little sweeter, but instead it's more like a bitter. Not bitter as in hops, but bitter as in the style. The finish is hollow and a bit harsh.

Not a great start for my Shipyard experience. Not a bad beer, but a tad off type.

Great Divide Brewing Company's 15th Anniversary Wood Aged Double IPA

I don't usually like wood aged beers. They usually fall into two groups that either taste like someone added vanilla extract or like they added bourbon. In other words, too much of a good thing. But I have yet to have a Great Divide beer that wasn't excellent, including Oak Aged Yeti, and this was a unique beer that I hadn't even heard of, much less tried, so I jumped on it.

Pours a deep reddish amber, like a hugely malty barley wine. Great tan head that gets pillowy and stays. Smells like a mellow pale. The oak apparently evens it out quite a bit so that it doesn't hit you in the face with a bread smell that most beers with this much malt would have, and there's just a trace of hops that wavers between floral and grassy.

Huge body, and while not as bourbon-y as many oak aged beers, it's still a little too much bourbon flavor for me. The 10% ABV is well hidden. The aftertaste is amazingly peppery. I think this is the first time I've really had that stand out in a beer, although a few have it listed as a characteristic. Gets more bourbon flavor as it warms, and the alcohol gets more noticeable in the smell as well.

I hoped for a little less bourbon, along the lines of the smell. Still, a very good beer. You can taste the Denver Pale Ale in it.