Roots Organic Brewing, Oregon’s first organic brewery, opened up in 2005 in Portland and made a name for themselves brewing up locally-acclaimed beers. I say "locally acclaimed" because until recently (to the best of my knowledge, anyway), the only way to drink any of their brews was to visit their brewpub in Portland.

However, our local good beer store—Newport Market here in Bend—started carrying their Woody Organic IPA. I snapped up a bottle when I found it. You can see where they came up with the name for this from my notes…

Appearance: Hazy copper orange. Light tan head was slight and slow to form.

Smell: Hoppy—woody and grassy and twiggy. Sweet sugar—candy. Almost a fresh hop character. Slightly (grape)fruity like a Cascade hop, but not entirely… one of the other similar varieties? (Their website says Magnum.)

Taste: First hit is the hops—oily strong and very woody—very bitter. Hops definitely dominate this beer. Malt—what you can taste of it, anyway—is a pale ale base with some sweetness.

Mouthfeel: Nicely bodied, a bit thick without being chewy. Hop oils(?) are strong on the mouth—very coating, you taste them well after.

Overall: One highly hopped and bitter beer, this one. They want to get your attention for sure. It’s not bad, especially if you like hops, but I do think it’s overbalanced in their favor. It’ll be off-putting to the casual beer drinker.

On BeerAdvocate, of the 10 reviews so far, it scores 3.58 out of 5 (not enough for their 100-scale scoring) and nine out of 10 approved. On RateBeer, it scores 3.67 out of 5 and is in their 89th percentile.