Slow burner

I gather from their socials that only a fraction of Boundary's output gets exported for sale south of the border, but there's a hell of a lot. Trying to keep up is probably not an option so here's a bunch of random stuff instead, collected over the last few months of 2020.

At the low end of the ABV scale is Virtual Times: just 3.5%. It's the opaque yellow of pineapple juice and the head disappears instantly. Officially it's a session IPA, with added lemon and coconut, which is a new one on me. The lemon scent of the aroma could be entirely hop-derived, and there's a touch of vegetal bitterness and some murky fuzz too. The texture is thinner than I think is entirely acceptable and the yeast bite dominates the picture in an unpleasant way. The hops, too, are overly harsh and extreme. Trying to overlook these two things was hard work, and there's not a whole lot else to find. The coconut is shy (wahey!) and there's a fun lemon cookie thing in the aftertaste, but otherwise it's all burn and bite and no fun. Not the worst thing 2020 gave us, but a long way from Boundary's best work.

A gose next: light and sessionable, right? Wrong! For Boundary's first take on the style they've ramped it up to 6% ABV and added blood orange and lime, calling it Bloody Chancer. I'll say. It looks like a glass of carrot juice: murky orange with no head soon after pouring. It smells sour and juicy, though more like freshly squeezed OJ than a beer. There's lots of juice in the flavour, and it starts sweet before the lactic sourness kicks in. That's just enough to make the beer zingy and refreshing in the middle, and it fades quite quickly. The finish is sweet again, with a fruit flesh effect. I missed the lime on the first few passes, but it's there, melding a little with the sour culture though providing a little bitter greenness. This isn't half bad. It delivers the things I like about fruited gose and is nicely refreshing. It's very easy to forget that ABV while quaffing through it.

Boundary's is the third contribution to the international charitable haze project, All Together, to come my way, following Whiplash and Garage. The others were 6.5% ABV but this one has been downgraded to 4.5%. It still smells great: roaring with jaffa pulp plus a cheeky smattering of garlic. The texture too is that of a stronger beer, thick and smooth as New England IPA tends to be. It's not sweet though, at least not in the vanilla-pudding sort of way these often are. I mentioned orange pulp with regard to the aroma, and that's how it tastes: fruit that has been not so much juiced as mashed, leaving the pith intact. That garlic is still there in the background, and I detect a pinch of nutmeg spice too. It's a lovely effort, as all these All Togethers have been. I don't miss those two ABV points at all.

Staying hazy, a double IPA with the unnecessary name of I Was Never Sure How Much Of You I Could Let In. An arm? Three toes? It's a mystery. What's not is the blend of Mosaic and Nelson Sauvin advertised on the label, dry-hopped at a substantial 22g per litre. The aroma from the deep orange 8%-er is very resinous, a heady mix of kerosene and fetid tropical fruit. No punches pulled, then. Or so I thought. The texture is of course smooth, but so is the flavour. No heat, no mad hop antics. That tropical thing is the centrepiece: gently sweet and juicy, like... well... an actual piece of pineapple or mango. The dank and grassy resins arrive in the finish, but with no sharp edges, just all smooth and mellow maaaan. This is a delight of a double IPA. It's a sipper, but effortless drinking at the same time. As a New Englander it's atypical, missing the sugary vanilla. As a demonstration of how to do New England DIPA well, it's exemplary. More of this sort of thing, haze brewers, if you please.

The final offering is, appropriately, called Eschatology: a name to gladden the heart of this sometime theology student. Even more gladdening, it's an imperial stout, 9.5% ABV, and they've included coffee and salted caramel. It poured very fizzily, piling up a mass of big-bubbled brown foam over the dense obsidian body. The aroma is more peanut shells than coffee or caramel, which is odd, but not off-putting. There's a powerful jolt of coffee at the front of the flavour, a proper wrap-both-hands-around-the-mug as it's thick and warming, thanks to 9.5% ABV and I suspect a high finishing gravity. After the coffee and liqueur there's hazelnut, churro sauce, and just a sprinkle of salt. It's not complex, but then it doesn't need to be, going for the comforting smoothness instead. Some cherry would be nice, mind.

There are some indications here that Boundary is one of our island's better brewers of New England IPA: they seem to have mastered getting the juiciness out of the hops without too much of the other nasty off-flavours that spoil haze's reputation. As a brewery they don't have quite the vocal international following of, say, Whiplash, but I think they're in that league. If you've not tried their wares lately, pick up something hefty and murky next time you can.