Surprise Vocation

My little local Tesco serves me well for the basics. Emergency Manislav and 4-for-€10 Leann Folláin and I consider my needs met. It was very surprising, then, to find a couple of high-end Yorkshire IPAs warming themselves on the ambient shelves, both canned less than a month previous. It wasn't beer shopping, it was a rescue mission.

First up, a splash of summer colour on a collaboration can between Vocation and Marble. Hop, Skip & Juice "hazy pale ale" nails its style credentials to the mast. If you don't get full New England vibes from this you deserve a refund, is the implication. It looks correct: the lemon-curd yellow of such beers, regardless of their strength -- this one a modest 5.7% ABV. It smells of custard vanilla first, backed by a sharper mix of lime jelly and fresh garlic. Again, bang in the centre of those inexplicable style parameters. The flavour, let it be noted, is not a mess. It's certainly dessertish: that mix of sweetness and lemon giving it an overarching meringue pie effect, with the garlic entering the picture as a savoury twang on the end; a two-course meal in reverse. But it's light, undemanding and fluffily textured, with none of the unpleasant extreme aspects that beers like this show too often. I wouldn't go so far as to call it "juicy", though. There's too much fuzz on the tongue for that. I guess it's a supermarket take on New England pale ale, and if that means it's balanced and accessible then I will absolutely take that, and commend it to you.

The ABV goes up to 7.2% for Love & Hate, badged as a New England IPA and following Vocation's standard branding and binomial nomenclature. Still hazy yellow, though it does look denser and more opaque than the previous. Here the garlic dominates the aroma and there's a worrying heat in the nostrils too. Is this the style reverting to its usual naughty ways? Yes. Yes it it. A rub of raw garlic across the palate, a scorch of hard alcohol and then a spike of dreggy yeast bite in the finish. This is both extreme and entirely normal for modern IPA fashion, and I despair for anyone who considers this a good beer or somehow progress. I've had worse, for sure, but here's a deliberately poor and unfinished-tasting beer getting into Tesco Express, where innocent civilians might find it. Hopefully the €4.40 price tag will keep them away when Manislav, Leann Folláin and Francis' Big Bangin' IPA are all on the same shelf and better value in every sense. Not forgetting the Hop, Skip & Juice too. Let's pray that punters are drawn to the colourful can first.

Moaning about fashion aside, a shout-out to the Tesco operative who decided that my neighbourhood store was worthy of these. There's a certain optimism -- especially when commerce is so heavily emphasising The Essentials -- in taking a chance on high-risk beer trends. Throw us another couple of randomers and I'll sure as hell buy them.