El ratolí que va rugir

#dammisdead squeals the label on the back of my dinky bottle of Revolution IPA, a product of Molta Birra in Girona, on the doorstep of the Catalan brewing giant. It's a 6.5% ABV pale amber beer, one I poured very carefully having noticed the thick gobs of yeast at the bottom of the bottle, all the while worrying about the slightly sour aroma it was giving off. Nothing severe, just... worrying. The yeast hasn't been too busy as it's rather flat. 70 IBUs are claimed, but they must be theoretical, to the point of aspirational. It's quite watery and there's very little sign of the Apollo and Simcoe hops billed on the label. Mildly spicy resins and a light acidic bitterness are your lot, hopwise. Not that it's a sticky malt bomb either, with just a minimal amount of caramel. The wateriness means the finish is quick, and the 200ml serving means I didn't spent much time contemplating its faults. On to the next.

MoltaBirrAS black IPA slips the ABV up a notch to 7.5% and the IBUs to 80. It's also in a more orthodox 330ml bottle, with more enthusiastic carbonation, fizzing up with ivory foam before falling back to a thin blanket of retained head. The aroma is all about the dark grain: burnt toast and coffee with maybe a suggestion of vegetal greenness behind it. The hop combination is a strange one: Vanguard, Amarillo, Citra and Fuggles, and it's the middle two I'd be looking for the action from, but I think the lower alpha varieties are doing the heavy lifting. Tangy rather than bitter, with some cheery soft peach flavours, but none of the big citrus one might expect from the specs. And those hops are very much masked by the malt again: the first sip reveals this to be a smooth and creamy stout, a milky coffee smoothness being its most prominent feature. It's a perfectly decent beer though I wonder if it's what the brewer intended. I imagine it has disappointed a hophead or two in its time.

Both of these bottles were relatively fresh, I should add, consumed less than two months after I bought them at the Alltech festival in February. While I was at the stand I tried Molta Birra's other exhibit L'Arrosa, another beer that promises big (Ahtanum, Simcoe, Citra) and there's also rice, discernible from the turbid milky appearance. I don't know what the rice contributes other than opacity, but the hops are present, giving it a nice light zesty quality. It's an unfussy, fun beer but, like the others, not one to keep the Damm execs from sleeping soundly under their FC Barca duvets.