Dry state of the art

It's time for one of my periodic checks on the state of non-alcoholic beer. Brulo (formerly Coast) is one of the new wave of UK brewers who make nothing but. The company is headquartered in Edinburgh with beer brewed in Belgium by De Proef. What attracted me most was the stylistic variation in their range: not just the usual IPAs and lagers.

The first one claims to be a 5 Fruit Gose, containing mango, passionfruit, guava, apricot and orange. It looks like juice, being orange, hazy and quite lifeless in the glass. There's a faint sparkle but no proper fizz. The fruit is present in a big way, meaning it tastes much more like a soft drink than a beer. Behind it there's a subtle note of salt, as well as the worty malt sweetness that most non-alcoholic beers exhibit. What's missing is any bite of sourness. Modern craft gose with fruit in it doesn't bother much with sourness but they usually make more of an effort than this. It's a fine thirst-quencher, and genuinely enjoyable, but not as a beer and certainly not as a gose. I think they've over-reached themselves a little here.

Maybe an IPA is safer. This one is a Centennial IPA, and is extremely pale -- a disturbing wan yellow, the colour of very dilute lemon squash. I don't think it's the visuals alone that made me think of lemons when I smelled it: there's a proper citrus here, though quite a lot of malt sweetness is promised as well. Again, there's lack of proper carbonation, though it does manage to form and keep a thin head. The flavour is... odd. I get a kind of squeaky, mineral, asparagus bitterness that's quite sharp. And then running in parallel with this is too-sweet malt extract, which eventually comes to dominate the whole picture. Both aspects are loud and brash, to the extent that this, too, doesn't really taste like a beer. Disappointing.

It looks like Brulo is falling into all the old traps. The last-chance saloon is pouring stout: the style which I think suits the non-alcoholic format better than any other kind of beer. If they mess this up I despair. The ambitious feature here is that it's a Dry Hopped Stout, Simcoe and Columbus doing the honours. Problem one: it's not black, being more of a reddish-brown. The aroma is lovely, though perhaps better suited to a black IPA than a stout, being all about the bitter and vegetal dankness. The hops were clearly added in abundance. It's more stoutlike on tasting with a strong coffee character. I don't get the wort or malt extract thing, but there is a sweetness, like the coffee has had a couple of spoons of brown sugar added. Despite the hopping, the bitterness is on the low side and that reduces the extent to which it tastes like a proper stout. I'm filing this one with the gose as something that's fun to drink but doesn't deliver a substitutable beer experience.

It's a mixed welcome for Brulo then. I appreciate their efforts at trying to provide something more interesting in the non-alcoholic space, but these aren't convincing. I'm more likely to reach for an actual soft drink than any of them.