Solvable Problem Is a Pale Ale That Admits It Solves Nothing

Green Cheek Beer Company writes its beer names as sentences. Which Echoes Belong?, It's Always Midnight In Papa's Backyard, Superdelic!? In This Economy?! - the current can list reads more like a group chat than a menu. Solvable Problem, out today, keeps that going and then spends its release notes undercutting itself.

The pitch runs through the weight of the world closing in, arrives at the promise that a pint will FOR SURE solve all your problems, and then inserts "(no it actually won't)" in the middle of the same sentence. Most breweries would have taken that out on the second pass.

The beer underneath is a double dry-hopped modern pale ale at 4.8 percent, built on Mosaic, Nectaron and Simcoe. Modern pale ale is doing quiet work as a label. It signals a beer hopped at something closer to IPA rates, but kept light enough to have more than one of, and finished dry rather than sweet.

The hop trio splits along familiar lines. Mosaic and Simcoe are the American pair, berry and resin respectively. Nectaron is the New Zealand outlier, tropical and passionfruit-leaning. Green Cheek's tasting note is bright zesty citrus with rainbow sherbet behind it. Sherbet is a more precise word than it looks, since it implies the citrus plus something rounder sitting underneath. The description then lands on a dry ale with a good backbone of bitterness. That is the part keeping 4.8 percent from turning into juice.

Four-packs are 16 dollars. It arrived today alongside a double dry-hopped take on one of the brewery's West Coast staples.