I used to be completely against drinking beer out of a can, preferring draft or bottles; but canning technology has changed since the mid-90s, and Sun King came along ten years ago and embraced that technology. I took a tour of the Sun King facility downtown, a year or so ago, and one of the things I learned that stuck with me is that hoppy beer—and that’s the vast majority of craft beers these days—degrades at an alarming rate if it’s bottled and not kept cold. It’s to the point now that I won’t even look at pale ales in bottles unless they’re in the cooler at the liquor store. (And that means no bottled pale ales from the grocery store, because Indiana.)
3 Floyds has always distributed their beer in bottles, and since that Sun King tour, that has been one of the main reasons I haven’t tried much from 3 Floyds (other than that six-pack of Zombie Dust, back when Zombie Dust was hard to come by). But as Bob Dylan sings, things have changed. 3 Floyds is now distributing some of their mainline beers in cans, including this flagship American Pale Ale, Alpha King, in tallboys.
I don’t remember what I thought of it when I had it in a bottle, but out of a can, this beer is a lovely experience. The caramel sweetness is more aggressive up front than the citrus hoppiness, but there’s a smooth citrus flavor on the back end. This becomes more pronounced as it warms up. I also get sort of a floral hit there at the end. This is a nice beer to linger over, and it sort of makes me remember the old days at Nicky Blaine’s, when it was located in the basement of the King Cole building, before it moved across the street to the basement of the Guaranty Building and took on a hip-hop-geisha motif that almost entirely betrays the Rat Pack stylings of the original concept.
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