Gone mainstream

It looks like Wide Street has taken a strange turn and gone straight. The mixed fermentation specialist, friend to yeast strains other breweries shun, has released a pair in seemingly very conventional styles. What's going on?
 
An oh-so-basic pale ale comes first, called Sound By Design. It's 4.4% ABV, hopped with El Dorado and Idaho 7 and contains nothing more exotic than oats. It poured clear and a pale yellow until near the end when it started to haze up, followed by some craft nuggets of congealed gack plopping into the glass in a most artisanal way. I began to doubt the clean yeast thing from the aroma. It has that gorgeous mix of ripe peach and spicy cedarwood that comes from Brettanomyces and its ilk. Is that really all done with hops here? The flavour spins in a different direction but no less pleasingly interesting. It's dry and a little tannic, and while it doesn't go full funky there's a certain highly attenuated quality, adjacent to sour but not quite. Maybe it's a social experiment: doing a mixed fermentation but saying nothing to see if the punter will notice. Or maybe the wild yeast who are presumably in charge of the brewhouse at this stage don't care about the intentions or labels of the two-legged lever-pullers. I won't speculate further. I will say that this is a fascinating and very tasty pale ale. It could pass for a run-of-the-mill American-style job, but I strongly suspect there's more than that going on.

To follow, a witbier: inexplicably the style of the moment from Irish breweries. Time-Lapse Witbier is the second in the brewery's Time-Lapse series of seasonal limited editions, borrowing a gold-medal-winning recipe from a local home brewer. That's always a good sign and more breweries should do it. In proper BJCP-compliance it's 5% ABV and a translucent yellow shade. They have eschewed the orange peel in the recipe but -- plot twist -- have replaced it with Citra hops for the requisite acidic kick. It works fabulously in the aroma: a fresh lemon spritz like a dead posh cloudy lemonade. So at the very least it smells like summer. It doesn't quite deliver that in the flavour, however, coming across quite dry. The Citra is a bit pushy, elbowing the coriander and any yeast spicing out of the way. You end up with something almost like an American pale ale, but not a good one. It's an interesting twist on the style and completely technically proficient. It's not an improvement on you-know-Hoe, however: the curse and challenge of craft wit.

Obviously we all pray the day will never come when Wide Street is a gigantic, fully-mechanised concern, turning out blandly consistent ciphers of the recipes it made its name on. These beers give me hope that that's a logical impossibility. Whether it's rogue microbes or home brewers on too long a leash, creativity will always find a way.