Ballast Point Grapefruit Sculpin IPA

I first had Ballast Point Sculpin IPA in 2009, from a trade, and it was then and is now a prime example of the San Diego IPA, hops a-blazing. I next tracked down a bomber in Chicago, and posted my original '09 notes about Sculpin here. It's been in our market for nearly two years now, so we can enjoy Sculpin whenever we want, though I find it's a bit too expensive to pick up with any frequency. But, look, the brewery is using it as template for adding extra ingredients, such as this one, which I did plunk down the coin for....

Ballast Point Grapefruit Sculpin. India Pale Ale with natural grapefruit flavors. Handcrafted and bottled in San Diego, California. Alc 7.0% by Volume,

Appearance: clear, bright golden coloring, gorgeous snow-white head stands tall atop and stays awhile.

Aroma: Grapefruit screams out of the glass and tears into the nose. Quite potent grapefruit-y aromas. Anything else? If there are, I can't hear them under all the grapefruit.

Taste: Boom! Grapefruit, with beer below it. The Sculpin IPA is here, but it's subtleties and nuances are fairly drowned out by the grapefruit. Other citrus notes and piney flavors can be felt but barely, here and there. Bitterness is all over it, but it's not devastating, it can be smooth and mildly exit the palate.

Another sip and there it is, the big splash of grapefruit, the easy, biscuit-y malt, the aggressive hop attack that's so friendly to my tongue.

But, a question remains: is this really necessary? And I'll go even further, which may alienate me even more from the common class of beer geek. There are some variations on popular brews which should remain small batch and one-off, rare and hard-to-get. You really need to just be at the one bar on that one night, and get it out of that one randal the enamel animal. You should have to be one of 40 people, some times. They shouldn't be mass-produced, and shipped over several states. This beer should not be in 6-packs. It was, and I paid the price, and this was the last bottle, and the previous 5 went down well and enjoyably, but left me somewhat hollow.

But it leads me to more questions, such as, is adding grapefruit juice, or essence, or whatever it is, better or worse than barrel-aging? Or randall-izing? It's real grapefruit, sure, but it's more grapefruit than needed. The original Sculpin has the grapefruit flavor in spades, there's no need for such an addition. It's like adding lemons to a hefe weizen or orange slices to a witbier.

The question remains whether I will try the Habanero Sculpin. Something tells me that I have to.