Beverage of the Week: Firestone Walker doesn't miss, even with tropical IPAs

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Previously, we’ve folded these in to our betting guides, whether that’s been for the NFL slate or a bizarrely successful run through the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey. 

Firestone Walker is a big deal.

The California brewery has been a darling of beer snobs for the last two decades, dotting countless “best of” lists thanks to a diverse tap list and the kind of quality control that comes with sticking around for 25+ years. They’ve got 28 different “active” beers with a rating of at least four stars and more than 100 reviews over on Beer Advocate. For comparison’s sake, my local established brewery, around since 1986 has … two of those.

That’s why their new Mind Haze tropical hazy IPA extension felt like a reward after a summer filled with vinegar seltzers and very good wine I cannot possibly appreciate. It was also a little dicey because, well, one very easy way to mess up a good beer is to overly fruit it. Adding citrus to a beer can help bring out the flavor or cover it up entirely (and is, for the most part, the only way to make Corona drinkable).

So what we’ve got here is a fairly popular base — it gets roughly 2,000 check-ins per month over on Untappd — and a warm weather twist. Will it live up to the Firestone Walker standard?