I reckon it’s been months since I had a beer labelled as a straight up NEIPA. The hazy IPA has well and truly taken over as the catch all name for any non-clear, new world hop forward beer over 6 percent ABV. Which, to be fair, is a lot easier to understand for the average punter, even if there’s no guarantee the beer is going to fall on a consistent area of the bitterness or sweetness spectrums. Anyway, what the hell am I talking about again? Oh yeah, One Drop have released a new NEIPA and smoothie sour!
Flipside is a 6.2 percent ABV NEIPA hopped with five different varieties using One Drop’s Clean Fusion process. I gotta say, if the NEIPAs from 2016 were anything like this, I might have got on board the bandwagon a lot earlier. I’ll get to the actual tasting notes in a sec, but one thing that really impressed me was the lacing left by a giant fluffy head.
When you’ve got a combo of more than a couple of hop varieties it can sometimes feel like a bit of a mélange without distinct aroma profiles but that’s not the case with Flipside. Here there’s a strong coterie of citrus aromas that dominate with mandarin and orange at the forefront and a bit of yellow peach on the palate. The mouthfeel is full but the malt base is very light and drinkable as all get-out. A moderate and piney bitterness morphs into a lingering taste of orange oil with a drying finish.
While there might be issues with consumers not knowing what to expect from hazy IPAs, releasing a smoothie sour called Tropical Super Highway should leave absolutely no one in any doubt as to what’s about to transpire. Here, One Drop have taken their base smoothie sour and fermented it with blueberries before adding mango, banana and apricot purée during canning. With so much fruit purée, I’d say this falls out of the can, with visible fruit pulp. Should probably go without saying but this smells an awful lot like a sour beer that’s had a lot of banana, berries and mango added to it.
Remember those little Runts lollies you’d used to be able to buy at corner stores in the 90s? They were small sour lollies shaped like the fruits they were flavoured as. Well, this tastes extremely similar to those. It’s surprisingly sour with all that fresh unfermented fruit making for a very ripe and juicy experience that pretty much eclipses any lactose sweetness. What a joy.
Judd Owen
Published October 27, 2022 2022-10-27 00:00:00
