It's the bane of the beer critic's life: 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.
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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