A new head brewer at Lost Palms in 2021 saw a new phase kick off in the brewery’s limited release beers. The Special Listing series focuses on variations of IPAs and sours in 440ml cans, and since this is the first entry in the series, let me take a moment to drool over the design on the cans before telling you about this particular beer.
There’s a retro real estate theme to the designs, with the centrepiece of each label being a photo of a room in a house circa 1970. This makes them stand out immediately – not only are they nostalgia bombs, but I could count on one hand the Aussie breweries that put out beers with photos on the labels. But the designs don’t rest solely on the photos; the rest of the label is an extension of the colours and patterns in the photo, etched out in matte-and-metallic patterning. Really quite charming.
The Orange & Mandarin Sour NEIPA can features a kitchen with lovely and horrendous orangey-brown cupboards that remind you of your nanna’s kitchen. Thankfully, the colour of the beer itself is a more vibrant orange than those cupboards, almost hitting Fanta hues in the right light.
Close your eyes and smell that sweet orange peel, zested into a ceramic bowl and ready to be made into icing for a sponge cake. On the tongue, however, there’s much more mandarin than orange, with a clean, tongue-scraping sourness. Running through the middle is a pithy bitterness of a citrus liqueur – not the sticky bought kind, but a homemade citrus liqueur made with homegrown fruit.
This is one of those beers where it's hard to know where the hops end and the fruit starts. But who really cares; it’s in the sweet inner sliver of that Venn diagram, and it's good.
Mick Wust
Published December 1, 2021 2021-12-01 00:00:00
