Welcome to the Boston Better Beer Bureau, our latest incarnation of the trusty suds reporting we’ve done at DigBoston ever since people referred to beer as suds. Really, we remember the days when we’d spend half our checks on fancy German bottles just so that we could review them, whereas these days breweries from all around New England kindly send us samplers and stay in touch. The BBBB is a new attempt to return that love, all while sharing more news about the innumerable microbreweries and pubs among us. This week we applaud a beer that, while brewed locally for an out-of-town imprint, has become a standby in our estimation after just a few years on the shelf.
If we idiotically avoided beers for having extremely interesting, artistic, or (dare I go so far as to say) collectible packaging, then we’d have missed out on some serious greats, like Aeronaut Brewing’s Hop Hop and Away, which we’d have also whiffed on if we were deliberately steering clear of pun brews.
We share this bit of self-reflection in light of our latest look at Save the Robots, which packs no play on words in its name (as far as we can tell) but features a can worthy of a trophy case. It’s a product we are happy to not have overlooked when we were briefly, nonsensically eschewing snazzy labels.
As for the bite itself, Save the Robots is an East Coast IPA crafted by Dorchester Brewing in Boston for Radiant Pig Beer Company in New York. The hops are citra and mosaic, among others, and as much as we hate it when people do our job better than we do, the copywriter who described the taste on the side of the can really nailed it: “This hazy, unfiltered gem has juicy tropical and citrus flavors, but finishes surprisingly smooth for such an aggressive amount of hops.”
We agree—this is a special pick. Stern, but easy going; bitter, but in the best of ways. It’s the kind of treat that, if you lived in an exotic futuristic robot hellscape in which small delicious brews had yet to catch on and you were for some sad reason made to ingest nonironic midgrade swill most of the time, the arrival of this artsy and delicious canister would make your week, month, and year. As long as civilization is such that you can safely walk to the bodega and purchase your favorite four-pack, we recommend you do so often.
Dig Staff means this article was a collaborative effort. Teamwork, as we like to call it.