Mother Earth Primordial Imperial IPA

Two weeks ago, while manning my beer beat at the latest meeting of the San Diego Brewers Guild, I took advantage of the hospitality of our host, Mother Earth Brew Co., and cashed in my ticket for a beer on the house.

Being a speaker on the agenda and wanting to stay as focused and coherent as possible, I opted for a six-ish percent alcohol-by-volume (ABV) Night Shift Coffee Porter and nursed it until my time behind the podium. Minding my Ps and Qs (pints and quarts) seemed superior to going big and face-planting in front of the who’s who of local brewing.

But that didn’t mean I wasn’t at least going to have a sip of something big, so I asked for a splash of Mother Earth Primordial Imperial IPA. A 9% ABV double India pale ale coming in at more than 100 on the international bittering unit scale, it’s a force to be reckoned with and Mother Earth’s answer to the San Diego brewer’s quandary: how am I going to satisfy the most insatiable of hopheads?

It wasn’t the first time I tried this beer, but it was the first time I enjoyed it as much as I did. So much, in fact, I almost threw my sobriety plan out the window. Instead, I waited until after the meeting and took a bomber home to enjoy on a purely recreational basis.

A sip of Primordial conveys the strength of a big beer. Big-time notes of pine, citrus, and tropical fruit lace around one’s taste buds. Instead of bombarding the palate, rendering it incapable of follow-up sensory enjoyment, the bitterness asserts itself in a way that balances out the four varieties of malt that help punch up the beer’s alcoholic potency, rendering it highly drinkable…and potentially dangerous if you’re about to speak in public.

When asked about the difference between this year’s batch and 2014’s, Mother Earth owner Dan Love cites the avoidance of a brewhouse mishap that occurred last year. Sidestepping that process error made for one heck of a beer this time around, and one I was glad I had the foresight to bring home.