Beer of the week: Daily Pale, Reuben’s Brews, Seattle

The beer: Daily Pale, Reuben’s Brews, Seattle

Style: Session IPA

Stats: 4.9 percent ABV, 55 IBU

Available: Six packs of 12-ounce cans at most bottleshops such as Ale Spike and Brigid’s Bottleshop and select grocery stores

My thoughts: Seattle’s Reuben’s Brews are no stranger to awards or honors. The brewery’s Triumvirate IPA just won a gold medal at the World Beer Cup and it won a pair of golds at last year’s Great American Beer Festival. The Ballard brewery makes good beer.

So it wasn’t surprising when the organizers of Seattle Beer Week, which kicks off May 12, tapped Adam Robbings and his crew at Reuben’s to make the official beer of SBW. What they came up with is a stellar version of one of the hottest styles going right now.

Daily Pale is a session IPA. The reason session IPAs are so popular is because of the fact they retain much of the flavor profile and bitterness of an IPA but in a lower-gravity beer that allows you to have more than one without feeling weighted down.

Reuben’s Daily Pale is a really good beer. I enjoyed it over the weekend on one of our unseasonably hot days and its light body was perfectly refreshing for the hot weather. It still had a fairly strong citrus flavor from the hops and the bitterness was light and lingered for the perfect amount of time. It made me wish I’d purchased two.

The opening ceremony for SBW is 5 p.m. Thursday at Reuben’s Brews in Ballard. For more information on Seattle Beer Week, including a list of events and locations, go to www.seattlebeerweek.com.

From the brewery: The Daily Pale is a hop-forward session IPA with an aroma and flavor profile driven by citrus and passionfruit, with kiwi and honeydew undertones. It’s light in the body, but balanced and focused on hop flavor and aroma, with a crisp, clean finish.