You take your eye off the ball for a little while and, whaddya know, there's five new releases awaiting your attention at White Bay. So, let's make amends, shall we?
Starting with Pineapple Session Sour and you have a beer with which the "Session" presumably refers to the 4.1 percent ABV but could as easily refer to the "Sour" too. This is no puckerer, rather a gentle tangerer in which the presence of 200 litres of pineapple juice is as apparent in the relatively full body as it is in the summery pineapple flavours and aromas.
With Das Abbott, they've given a winner from this year's Sydney Beer Week Pro-Am a chance to scale up his winning brew. In the case of Brendan Abbott, that's his Vienna lager, one that marries an appealing chestut colour with the layers of toasty, syrup spongecake crust malts with a smooth finish. Neatly, Brendan worked with them on the label artwork, which celebrates brewing at home.
Veneration starts a trio of hop-forward releases. This one is a West Coast pils – a style we wrote about here earlier in the year. While many such beers we've come across have showcased fruitier modern hops, here the selection of hops from the US and NZ instead leaves Veneration rather closer to pilsner's roots. There's no OTT fruitiness, rather aromas of a more piney nature, with the prominent, crisp malts hosting a broad, soft, palate-coating bitterness.
Very much putting punchy modern hop products to the fore, however, is Same Same But NEIPA, in which the brewers employ concentrated forms of Citra and Mosaic alongside experimental variety HBC 586 to create a hazy beer that smells like blended tropicitrus meringue topped with ripe stonefruit. The NEIPA comes with a head as fluffy as the wheat, spelt and oats-enhanced body is sweet and spongey.
Which leaves the largest of the quintet, double IPA Brightness Through The Pines. It pours with a depth of colour that wouldn't be amiss in a barleywine, while the wantonly fruity trio of Mosaic, Enigma and Idaho 7 hops are twisted from the shapes you'd expect them to make in something lighter, coming across with much in the way of dark berries and licorice hop character. Add in rich, cake-like malts and a hint of spicy anise amid the bitterness and you've got a DIPA from days of yore.
James Smith
Published December 3, 2024 2024-12-03 00:00:00
