The Blues are calling

It's been a few weeks since any American beer has featured on these pages, so here's a selection from Oskar Blues that has been sitting in the drafts folder, patiently awaiting its turn.

We'll start at the start with One-y, a sort of diet IPA, promising an even 100 calories. It looks like a slimmers' beer too, pouring a watery yellow with a sickly looking haze and the thinnest of heads. You need to take a big huff to get any aroma from it -- there's just a faint dankness echoing from the deep. Unimpressive so far, but the foretaste is nice: a fresh combination of classic American hop flavours like grapefruit, lemon, pine and weed. Unfortuntely there's no malt substance to carry these forward and it all fades out quickly, leaving just a sad wateriness behind. It's very unsatisfying to drink, and frustrating because the constituent parts would work very well together in a bigger beer. The brewery may proffer the excuse that it's only 4% ABV, which is nothing in American terms, but I know plenty of British brewers who can make American hops absolutely sing at that sort of strength. No excuses.

The next step up the strength ladder is Rosé for Daze, 6% ABV and promising slight tartness with hibiscus and prickly pear. It really does look like a rosé wine: not pink pink, but the rich red of polished copper. The aroma gives little away, smelling crisp and plain, like a rye cracker. Its flavour is milder than anticipated but everything is there: the tartness front and centre, melding with the sour cherry and raspberry effect I usually get; and then the silly pink-tasting prickly pear arrives late and is uncharacteristically polite, not interrupting the others. I think that a bit more flower and fruit would be welcome over the acidity, and you get poor value for your 6% ABV given it's another thin one. Still, if you don't mind your pink fruit beers being a little on the severe side there's fun to be had here.

To follow, an oddity: Death by King Cake. I was hitherto unaware of a dessert called "King Cake", let alone that it can be fatal. The given style is nothing more specific than "ale", to which has been added vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, cacao, orange peel and pecans. You'd wonder if there was room for malt and hops after all that. It's 6.5% ABV. For some reason I thought it would be dark so was surprised by the medium amber colour. Again the aroma has little to say, but the spices are definitely conspiring in there. The texture is thick and syrupy, with no immediate flavour, giving a first impression of a super-strength tramps' lager. The orange peel is probably the most prominent of the novelty flavours, then the cinnamon and chocolate. None of it is very loud, though. This tastes of alcohol more than cake; the spices an afterthought. It's inoffensive, and maybe the light touch on silliness is a point in its favour. Consider it as a slightly milder alternative to your after-dinner snifter of barley wine.

We approach top-out with Can-O-Bliss "Tropical India Pale Ale" at 7.2% ABV. It's a bright and hazy orange colour, smelling sweet and a bit sticky, like Fanta or orange travel sweet. That sweet jaffa theme continues on tasting. It's a very typical, even old-school, American IPA, bringing to mind echoes of Odell IPA and Bell's Two Hearted. Any stoners looking for something in their line will be disappointed. OK, if you take a big enough mouthful there's maybe a certain bud-like resin at the back of the palate, but you'd have to be looking for it. This one, finally, is full textured and full flavoured, tasting like the beer One-y could have been. With no gimmicks, and barely a nod to modern vanilla-and-garlic IPAs, it's unspectacular and nicely done. Well worth adding into your 4-for-€10 mix where you see it.

My last is a longtime fixture in the Oskar Blues line-up, but one I'd never tasted before, an archetype of the Americo-Belgian style Skaatch Ale: Old Chub. It's 8% ABV and a mahogany brown colour, topped with a handsome ivory-coloured head. It pours dense and it smells dense, all toffee and liquorice. They swap order in the flavour, with the bittering herbal aniseed to the fore, then burnt caramel rolling in behind. That's pretty much your lot, the contrasting elements combining into a nutty fade-out. While it's big and chewy on the palate and warming in the belly, there's no booze heat in the flavour, which is quite a deft move. The end result is smooth, mellow and easy going; verging on boring. It's the sort of strong and gentle beer you can relax into after tasting a selection of brash and loud ones, offering thick Belgian-style fun minus the fruity esters.

Quite a mix here, but the classically-constructed IPA wins the day for me.