Trafalgar India Ink Black Pale Ale

I like hoppy, bitter beers, so I'm always on the lookout for good India Pale Ales.  And yet this whole time I'd never heard of the seemingly contradictory Black IPAs.  They appear to be more common from west-coast breweries, but $4.75 at the LCBO will get you a bottle of India Ink Black Pale Ale (650 mL, 5.0% abv) from Oakville's Trafalgar brewery (another nice bottle design, incidentally)

This is essentially a normal pale ale with some dark malt thrown in for colour; the result is a beer that looks like a red porter, or perhaps (god forbid) a Kalimotxo.  Not much head on it, but what there is sticks around -- it's been an hour since I poured mine and there's still a little bit floating on top.  The aroma has the usually nut and caramel scents of a darker beer; I don't get any of the citrus notes that some other reviews have mentioned.

The taste is where it gets interesting, but not for the reasons you'd think.  At first this beer tasted like a particularly hoppy porter; but then, if I closed my eyes, blocked out the image of drinking a dark beer, and had another sip, it was more like a regular IPA.  Eyes open, porter.  Eyes closed, IPA.  It got to the point where I could flip back and forth on each sip just by thinking about it.  The actual taste was the same, but the experience was notably different, like a synaesthetic version of this picture.

We're skirting the edge of the epistemic void here.  If the experience of drinking a beer changes depending on how you think about it, what does that imply for any kind of objective review?  Maybe it's best not to worry about it, since either way I still liked it.  And isn't that what this project is really about?