Temple Brewing’s celebration of the start of a new Chinese New Year is back for its fourth year, with the "lucky" 888 mandarin beer taking on a new style and as new symbolic animal. You can read the story behind the beer and the very first release, a lion saison, here, while the last two versions have both been both mandarin pale ales. As we reach the year of the tiger, the Brunswick East brewery have brewed a sour that uses not just mandarin juice but is also dry-hopped with Hop Products Australia’s citrus-creating Eclipse hops.
On pouring it, the beer comes incredibly close to looking like that added juice in a glass, with a soft light and hazy orange hue and the flavours of mandarin might well be the most apparent out of any of the 888 beers, Whatever part of a mandarin is your favourite, you're likely to find it with a zest of the fruit’s peel, freshly-squeezed juice and a flavour closer to mandarin lolly all on show at once. Those sweeter fruit notes are then balanced by the beer’s sharp tart finish to make the mandarin sour not only right for a lucky new year (which we could all surely use), but for a swelteringly hot day too.
Will Ziebell
Published January 24, 2022 2022-01-24 00:00:00