Darkness and daylight

This post started out as a quick catch-up with YellowBelly Brewery but their output being what it is, it's now a five-beer mini-marathon.

We begin with the fourth release in their members-only club series. CloisterPhobia came branded as a 7.5% ABV dark abbey beer. Any Trappist notions are immediately extinguished by the fast-dissipating excuse for a head. It smells roasty, like a porter. The flavour has a bit more Belgian about it: hints of prunes, raisins and chocolate, but there's a lack of richness which I assign to the relatively low alcohol. This seems to me like a quadrupel brewed to dubbel strength, so just a little off kilter and lacking in power. While decent, it's no improvement on the Belgian originals.

And if you want on board for the 2019 club, bookings are now being taken.

A pair of new sour beers landed a couple of weeks previously, appearing side-by-side in UnderDog and I'm sure plenty of other places too.

Sunset was 7.2% ABV and a deep orange colour. This piles in the grains, coming across crisp and husky, primarily. The obvious strength lends it a soft warmth which butts up against a curdling sourness, a flavour which is merely tangy at the outset but develops into full-on vinegar by the end. This is a real bruiser, far from a fun and zippy sour beer, more of a serious chin-stroker. As a man of unrefined tastes I found it hard to enjoy.

What do we get with Sunrise, other than an ABV reduced to 7.1%? It's still weighty, and identical looking, but there's definitely more zing in this: a distinct squirt of Jif lemon and some coconut oil, leading to a refreshingly tart finish. It's not all that complex but it is tasty, making good use of dry hopping to add character to a big and blousey sour beer. I still think the strength is unwarranted: the pair of these would have been better beers under the 5% ABV mark, I reckon.

Looks like I'm hard to please when it comes to the 7.x% ABV zone: your abbey ale is too weak and your sour ones too strong. How about a nice Baltic porter, hmm?

Below that line there's Usurper, a blueberry-flavoured ale at 6.2% ABV. Information about it is thin on the ground at time of writing, but it looks the part: a bright and shiny plum colour. The texture is thick, adding a poster paint feel to its poster paint looks, and the first flavour is a harsh, almost burning, yeast bite. There's a syrupy and jammy fruit flavour, more sweet blackcurrant than tart blueberry to me. A dry minerality cleans up the sugar towards the end and might have been a neat finisher were it not for the final throat-burn of dreggy yeast. What should have been a fun beer ended up a bit of a chore to get through.

A second can rounds this one out. The top-tier punnage of the new east coast IPA -- The Crystal Haze -- is offset somewhat by its caramelised malt not making much of a contribution to the flavour or appearance. Oh well. Perhaps it's a little darker than these tend to be but it's still very much in the normal golden-orange NEIPA spectrum. The aroma is very ripe fruit: squashy mandarins, leaning towards solvent. On tasting it's cleaner, thankfully. It starts on zesty orangeade and some sweeter pineapple and mango, before flipping suddenly to savoury garlic and white onion. That was a little disconcerting at first but I got used to it quickly and was enjoying the flavour choreography by the end. It was a relief, also, not have to chew this one. At 5.8% it has the lowest ABV of the bunch, and while there's a certain New England fuzz to the texture, it's by no means difficult drinking.

Quite a mixed bag here, and nothing that seriously impressed. The YellowBelly machine rumbles on...