Beverage of the Week: Sweetwater's hazy IPAs swing hard -- and one is a home run

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. 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.

Sweetwater has bought a lot of goodwill inside my brain. The Georgia-based brewery was a standby when I was a broke graduate student in Nashville, typically available for $2.50 a pint at my local Flying Saucer on trivia night.

While it’s 420 Pale Ale was a little too strong from my “still-used-to-Pabst” taste buds, Sweetwater Blue helped fill the gap in my years of hating bitter hops before abruptly loving them. There are at least a few 2007-era pint glasses with the brewery’s fish logo adorned upon it someone on a shelf in my basement.

But living in Wisconsin the past 12 years means I haven’t had a Sweetwater in a while. While other southern brewers like Abita and Cigar City have made minor inroads in the drinkin’-est state in the union, the Atlanta-based beer is a virtual non-entity up here.

So when I got the chance to try a couple of new-ish — at least to me — Sweetwater beers for the sake of “research” I jumped at the chance. I drank the H.A.Z.Y. double IPA and Mosaic single hop hazy IPA (along with a few 420s and Blues) in hopes of sending me back 15 years.

It mostly panned out!