Otherside weren’t mucking around with their first Experimental release for 2021. With COVID logistics hampering the normal flurry of beers, the brewery team describe Triple Juicy West Coast IPA as the biggest and most expensive beer they’re ever made, and also the smallest volume yet.
“We wanted to come out with something big,” is how head brewer Rhys Lopez puts it.
And there’s no doubting that for a millisecond. Despite the finesse, each sip numbs the back of the head a little more – in a good way, all the while remaining enticingly moreish. Inside the vibrant orange hue is a very cohesive beer, with a lengthy presence and booze warmth. Peach and nectarine feature, with faint passionfruit, and while it’s not overly bitter for its size, which is the point of this hybrid – a juicy West Coast IPA – the lengthy dry close balances, sequestering sweeter fruity characters before another salvo.
If the 3XJWCIPA intensity is too much, there’s always the fun-loving side of beer: the pastry sour. For their third Slurpee Sour outing, Otherside combine 400g of NSW dark cherries, vanilla and lactose into a something of a liquid cherry creamsicle ice cream with IPA-sized booze. Dark fruit tartness lurks, providing depth while never quite stealing the limelight from the frivolities above. In a space of the beer world where flaccid fruit / acidity ratios abound, this is intelligent silliness.
Guy Southern
Published March 15, 2021 2021-03-15 00:00:00
