Back on Black's

Another week of breakneck Irish beer reviews begins down Kinsale way with four new ones from Black's.

As a mix of "lager and pink grapefruit soda", Ready Up! meets the technical specifications of a radler, though with an ABV of 3.8% it packs a lot more heft than one of this style ought to. In the glass it's a clear deep golden; completely without haze or pinkness. I love when beer shows real grapefruit characteristics, and this has that spicy, peppery grapefruit rind effect strongly in the aroma. The flavour is sweeter — a sugary lemonade foretaste entirely in keeping with a radler — and enough of a grapefruit taste. The extra dose of lager is very apparent too, however, bringing a clean malt crispness and even a mildly green hop bite, as well as a decently full body. There are no soft-drink tendencies and it definitely leans more towards being a "normal" beer than a shandy. As a midstrength grapefruit-flavoured lager it does an excellent job. You don't even need to wait for a sunny day to drink it.

The brewery has made a couple of return visits to the recipe for the cloudy IPA, Ace of Haze, it first released in 2017. The second version dropped the ABV from 5.1% to 4.2% and deployed Simcoe, Citra and Mosaic hops in their cryo form. It's a custard yellow colour and smells of all the greens: spring onion, mint and marijuana. You don't often get this sort of beer at such a low strength but it works really well for the texture, rendering it light and fluffy. An oily garlic burn in the foretaste gives way to a deliciously juicy middle and finish, showing apricot, pineapple and mandarin. Even though it demonstrates some of the NEIPA features I dislike, there's enough good stuff to more than tip the balance positively, offering lots of great complexity at a very modest strength. They could have stopped twiddling the recipe here.

But they didn't, and it was followed by Ace of Haze - Idaho 7 in which the lead hop is joined by Cashmere and Strata while the ABV stays where it was. It's duller — hazier, I suppose — than the foregoing. The aroma is beautifully juicy, full of mango, pineapple and peach. It's just as light but not as fluffy and even a little thin. A lemony bitterness opens the flavour, followed by a lightly peppery spice, fading to oily resins and just a rub of garlic. The juice has all but vanished but I'm happy with what's left. It's flavoursome but very sessionable, and completely clean. The two beers deliver a similar message but with the accents in completely different places.

There are at least a couple more Aces to come and I'm looking forward to giving them a whirl in due course. In the meantime, both of these are well worth your while.

Perhaps I didn't get the full effect from the final beer, Totally Tropical, as the weather was overcast and windy when I opened it. This is an IPA with pineapple and mango, a deep orange colour with a slight haze. It smells quite artificial: perfumed rather than fruity. The texture is thick and there's a vanilla foretaste, enough to make me check the ingredients for lactose (there isn't any). That chemical syrup effect is even more concentrated in the flavour, claggy and unpleasant. There's a certain herbal heat behind this; an out-of-place kick of peppermint. Given it blind I doubt I would have been able to pick out the supposed fruits it's meant to taste of. And, as with so many beers like this, nothing about it says "IPA" either: nothing you could call a hop profile. There is, granted, a waft of Lilt in the afterburp, but it has taken more than that to impress me for some years now. This really isn't my sort of thing and I question anyone's ability to have "a chill summer session" on it, as promised by the can description.

I tend to associate Black's with big heavy-hitting beers in the American style but, Tropical IPA aside, there's a good demonstration here of how well they also work in the more sessionable space.