When we wrote up the original Twang from Ballistic, I made a reference to Wile E Coyote being shot from a giant bow. Now that Twang Red Papaya is here, I can’t stop thinking of Daffy Duck dressed as Robin Hood and tripping down a hill into a pond.
Each beer in the Twang series bears a broken guitar on the label; a red papaya cut in half lengthways (as any image search of red papaya will show) looks a little like said guitar, but perhaps more like one of the guitar’s stringed ancestors: a mandolin or a lute; and a mandolin or a lute just makes me think of this classic Daffy Duck clip. Perhaps there’s just something about Twang that delivers the same sense of whimsy as Looney Tunes.
The red papaya version is a hark back to the original. It retains the light golden colour of the base beer, and carries more of the clean sour zing than the past few fruited versions. The papaya addition kicks in with the aftertaste, bringing a mild wash of ripe pawpaw to tame the upfront lactic acid. These two flavours play off against each other, take you to the brink of pucker territory before bringing you back again, allowing you to trip along merrily, to trip it up and down; or in the words of Daffy, to trip-it-trip-it-trip-it…
Mick Wust
Published November 5, 2019 2019-11-05 00:00:00
