San Diego County’s Stone Brewing release this hoppy, gluten-reduced (they don’t say how) brew – let’s see if the suds live up to the presumptuous name (oh, right, it’s Stone, never mind…).

This 12oz bottle pours a slightly hazy, pale golden amber colour, with three surprisingly chubby fingers of puffy, rocky, and bubbly (of course it is) off-white head, which leaves a bit of thick stringy lace around the glass as it lazily sinks away.

It smells of mildly dank pine resin, grainy and crackery pale malt, a twinge of forlorn caramel sweetness, some flinty bath salts, a tame generic citrus fruitiness, and further testy leafy, herbal, and floral hops.  The taste is gritty, grainy pale malt, ephemeral caramel notes, sodden white saltine crackers, a muddled tropical fruit character, fading acerbic pine needles, and more rounded herbal and floral hop bitters.  The bubbles are duly supportive and challenging in their robust frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and sort of smooth, those varying new-fangled hops snickering and traipsing through the daisies here, as it were.  It finishes off-dry, the touched malts struggling to keep up with the lingering south seas and domestic hop goodness.

Overall, I feel that the ‘delicious’ moniker here is solely employed as a version of their ‘sorry, not sorry’ mantra, i.e. they are pre-apologizing for any lacking perceived in this offering due to the messing about with the gluten.  Which is much ado about nothing, as they’ve got nothing to worry about, IMHO.  A solid West Coast IPA, gluten-rife or not.