Compare the Cashmere

Three new beers from Trouble Brewing today, all with one thing in common.

Limón is a pale ale of 4.5% ABV and brewed with Cashmere and Cascade hops, plus a cheeky fistful of lemongrass. It's amber coloured and slightly hazy, suggesting they haven't skimped on the malt nor gone overboard with filtration. The aroma is impressively lemony: fresh and spritzy, like an actual zested fruit. That's what the flavour does too, adding a properly bitter aftertaste to the sunny front end. This is not a complicated beer and both body and carbonation are medium, meaning it's not simply a down-the-hatch refresher, though I do believe it could be put to that purpose if required. There's enough substance for it to be satisfying, staying just on the happy side of gimmicky. I can see it working well on draught in the pub, if given the opportunity. It's not a no-nonsense beer, but the nonsense is kept to the absolute minimum.

Trouble becomes the third brewery to create a beer called Ár gCairde for Mo Chara in Dundalk. This one is a hazy pale ale and 5.1% ABV. Cashmere features again, along with Idaho 7 and Mandarina Bavaria. There's a touch of the pithiness found in Limón repeated in the aroma here, and I'm assigning that to Cashmere. It doesn't smell particularly distinctive for what it is, however. The texture is a little watery, which is a surprise given the strength and the haze, and what flavour there is tails off quickly. At the beginning it's quite a generic citrus-and-vanilla, with a harder savoury edge of burnt plastic or sesame paste. I'm not a fan. The can promises juicy -- and Trouble normally knows juicy -- but this isn't it. There's not enough flavour, and what's there isn't particularly enjoyable. Drinking it straight after the Limón was like moving from stereo back to mono.

So I left it to another day before opening the decider of this set: Katana. Cashmere for the triple and the return of Cascade in this 6.4% ABV IPA. It appears to be in some sort of obscure IPA sub-style which isn't at all hazy and a sort of golden amber in colour. It'll never catch on. Dry and bitter, right? Lashings of grapefruit and pine? Nope. This is soft and quite tropical in both aroma and flavour, giving me cantaloupe, nectarine and plum with spiky herbal grassiness on the finish. That tail-end does grow in prominence as it goes along, covering the stonefruit flavour somewhat, though the ripe and juice-driven aroma remains. Despite the hard-edged name it's fun: bright and fruity while at the same time weighty and warming, bringing almost a touch of Belgian style to an otherwise very American IPA. It's not following any beer trend I'm aware of, and all the better for that.

Cashmere's zippy zesty lemon is what holds these three together as a set. Even though they're all types of pale ale with a hop in common, I got three quite different experiences. It probably goes to show that drinking a beer is the only way to find out what the beer is like. The specs on the can aren't much help; drink all the things.