Dipping the toe

Beer from Manchester brewery Wander Beyond arrived in Ireland recently. I had never tried their wares so was curious, and remained so even when I failed to find anything in a style I usually like, and the pricetags to be very much on the hefty side. Still, everyone gets a fair shake here so I went as far as drinking two of them, to ascertain if I wanted more.

First up, at UnderDog, was Anura, described nonsensically as an "imperial Berliner weisse", being 7% ABV. It arrived an opaque beetroot-purple colour, smelling intensely of fruit sherbet and chalky candy. I don't know what actual fruits or syrups they've dosed this with but to me it smelled of cherry and raspberry. It's sweet, certainly, but it avoids full-on stickiness owing to a dry quality which the brewery might want to badge as sourness, but it's not. Once that mild bite clears the fruit away there's nothing left but a watery finish. This is very simplistic fare, one dimensional and doing little to justify the near-lambic-level price.

And now for something completely different: a canned pastry stout called Cassiopeia. It goes for about a tenner a can and I have my legendary wife to thank for springing for one and splitting it with me. Salted caramel is the stated pastry of choice and it smells very caramelly; sickly sweet but not very salty. And the flavour? Sweeeeet. Pink marshmallows, fudge, nutty nougat, cherry jam and concentrated chocolate-flavoured syrup: not the posh kind. This is sweet enough to push through to the other side and become a metallic clanging twang in the finish. It's awful. Not Omnipollo-Yellow-Belly awful, but quite far along that road to sugary perdition.

I'm not intending to wander beyond these two examples. I was right to suspect they wouldn't suit me and I'm therefore not going to pursue this brewery any further, for a while anyway.