Sunshine status

It's strange and charming that a brewery as established as Anchor in San Francisco still has new beers for me to try. Quite a raft of them are now available in Ireland and I felt I should do some catching up.

I'm a little confused by the name of Brewer's Pale Ale: Citra Hop Blend. If it's Citra, how is it a blend? Is it single-hopped? It doesn't say. 5.3% is the ABV and it pours a dark and hazy shade of yellow, topped with lots of bright white foam. The aroma isn't especially powerful, though I'll admit my bottle may not have been the freshest. It's quite sweet to taste: orange-flavoured chews and lime jelly. There's a mineral, alkaline, bathsalts buzz in the finish. When Citra is the headlining act I expect a solid kick of bitterness, but that's lacking here. As an easy-going American Pale Ale it's fine, but undistinguished.

On to the IPAs next, beginning with Fog Breaker, at 6.8% ABV. It pours like a a witbier, a greyish amber, with a disturbing quantity of gunky clumps floating through it. I think this beer might have died in the bottle. It tastes dead: a dull bread or biscuit quality, dried out and characterless. The brewery says there should be pineapple and yuzu in this; there isn't. A faint citrus quality hovers around the edges of the aroma but it's absent from the flavour. This isn't unpleasant, it's just a big shrug in a glass. I'm actually intrigued to find out what it's supposed to taste like because it can't possibly be this. Moving on...

Did you know the waters of San Francisco Bay are pollution-free? Me neither, but apparently this is ensured by the good ship Baykeeper, according to the label of a beer named after it. It's an IPA, of a full 7% ABV and quite a dense hazy orange colour. The label which speaks so highly of the boat tells us very little about what the beer is made from, other than it's juicy and fruit-forward. Turns out it's another orange-and-minerals job, not juicy but with a pleasing punch of hop. The high-ish strength is well used, giving it a rich texture and a pleasant warmth. Satsuma, tangerine and jaffa all feature in the middle, between the grassy bitterness up front and the long waxy finish. There's a very English vibe to it, that earth-and-orange character that makes me think of Fuggles hops in particular. Drop the ABV and throw it on cask and it would be convincingly Kentish. This is quite retro, but I like it.

Finally, one which feels like old Mr Anchor allowed his grandson to design a beer for him: San Franpsycho juicy IPA with peach and apricot. I thought it would be full-on emulsion but it's only slightly hazy: a bright and sunny golden colour. The aroma is strangely savoury: caraway, shading to rubber, which is worrying. None of that in the flavour though, thankfully. There are two distinct sides to the taste: one is an old school, bitter and clean west coast US IPA with a little crystal sweetness and an almost harsh rasp of citric hop bitters. And then there's the other aspect: the fruit. Does anybody out there remember Magic Hat No. 9? I don't know if it's still being brewed, but this has a lot in common with it. It's a sickly, syrupy, peach-and-apricot flavour which has very little to do with real fruit. It's like someone sprayed the glass with cheap perfume while I wasn't looking. It is not an improvement and it does not render the underlying proper IPA "juicy". A decent beer ruined by fashion, is my verdict. There's a lot of it about.

There's a lack of freshness and vigour in all of these. One could make an obvious observation that hoppy beer which has travelled from San Franciso to Dublin will lose much of its character on the way, but that's far from the case with lots of other American imports. I suspect that veteran Anchor is just taking a more old-fashioned and sedate approaching to its hopping regimes.