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It's the bane of the beer critic's life:
liver disease sensory uncertainty. Can you trust your palate when you think something's amiss, and is it worth the risk of writing it down? I have no training or qualifications in tasting beer, but I have drank a lot of them, and scribbled out at least a few words on most of that. I still make no claims that what follows is normative or objective.
I get
a taste off Bog Hopper beers. It varies in intensity, but there's a consistent rubbery note in all of their beers: stale, sulphurous and generally unpleasant. It came straight to mind, unbidden, with
The Biggest Boar, a Bog Hopper IPA I drank at The Brew Dock in Dublin. This is 6.8% ABV, but beyond the prodigious strength has nothing of the IPA about it. I got sweet strawberry and caramel, more like an Irish red ale, and then that rubber hit. I passed it around the table and asked my fellow drinkers what they thought. Nobody was mad into it, but none of them spotted the phenols either. Maybe it's just me.
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The experiment continued with
Heiferweizen at The Black Sheep. Despite the name, it's not pitched as a weissbier but as an American wheat beer -- yes, that style I
recently said doesn't really exist any more. My pint arrived clear, amber and all but headless, and there wasn't anything especially wheaty about the texture: it's perhaps more full-bodied than might be expected at 4.9% ABV. My guinea pig this time was non-committal, but there was certainly nothing wildly off about the beer to him. But I got that rubbery tang again. It wasn't as pronounced as in the IPA, hanging around in the back after a jammy strawberry sweetness and a drier old-world metallic hop bite. Again the spectre of Irish red ale floated into view. Without the off-flavour this would be decent if unexciting, so that's probably how you'll find it. Just remember it's not meant to be a weissbier.
In conclusion: I dunno. I'm not in a position to warn you off Bog Hopper beers, but I do think it would be worth the brewers' while getting some proper sensory evaluation done. Actually, every brewery should probably do that regularly anyway.
You may just be cursed with a sensitive palate. I've only tasted skunking a couple of times, but some people seem to get it if they leave a beer in the sun for five minutes.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I've never worked out what hop Marble were using a few years ago. It was distinctive as hell, but the only description I've ever been able to come up with is "made everything smell of vomit" - and presumably most people weren't getting that. (It was the hop, too. They had a MTB once, with those little dishes of hops to sniff, and bam! there it was - that unique vomit-y smell. Mm-mmm.)
Knew a head brewer who couldn't taste diacetyl and all his beer reeked of it. He moved on and was replaced, and the brewery's output increased hugely.
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