Top stuff

I'm trying out a new brewery today: HopTop, based in Budapest. First the fundamentals, then a bit of silliness.

To begin, a Vienna lager called Bécsi Ászok. It's one of the paler ones, I guess, being only faintly reddish with a haze as well. 5.3% ABV makes it a stronger version than most, I think. It's... a good medium-sweet lager. Biscuit is the main feature of the flavour; thin and pale ones, for a refined afternoon tea. No bitterness balances the grain and sugar but it's not so thick or sticky that that becomes a problem. There's not much else on offer; despite being from a "proper craft" brewery this isn't a sip-and-consider beer but a decent, unfussy, quaffable lager. The 33cl can and modern graphics are merely misdirection.

Next is a dark lager which they elected to call Dark Lager. Such things are usually black so it was a bit of a surprise to find this one is reddish brown. The result is a little lacking in roast or crisp dry bite, which is what I was hoping for. Instead there's a sweet biscuit and raisin quality and I got over my initial disappointment quite quickly. While this is every bit a clean lager, though one with a fair heft to it at 5% ABV, there's a rounded richness too. In Germanic terms it's less a schwarzbier and more like an Alt. 

Belga Meggy translates as "Belgian cherry" so I guess this next one is a kriek? It's 4.8% ABV and a cartoonishly bright scarlet colour, though the head is white, not pink. The aroma is extremely sweet, beyond jam or jelly and into some kind of industrial concentrate that's meant to be heavily diluted before tasting. The flavour pulls it back a little, but only a little, and it's the full Bakewell tart with a side cherryade experience -- not so much cherry as a ten-year-old's idea of how cherry should taste. As such, it has a lot in common with the syrup-derived gutter krieks of industrial Belgian lambic: there's still a faint echo of a fully attenuated sour beer lurking meekly in the background. It's not fancy or quality or anything but I have a sneaking fondness for it. Beers like this are what got me interested in interesting beer in the first place. It's one that I enjoyed, but don't necessarily recommend.

The set tops out on one described as an "imperial rauchbier". A reichbier? This is Smokey Blinder, 8.1% ABV and a muddy ochre colour. It smells quite kippery, which is never a good sign in a smoked beer, while the mouthfeel is thin with lots of fizz. That at least keeps it clean -- it would have been very easy for this to be a sticky mess, but I'm guessing I have lager yeast to thank for chomping through that. The smoke flavour, which is the only flavour there is, is nicely savoury with a pleasant hammy effect, just like the good stuff from Franconia. It begins crisply and finishes with a different sort of crispness, like brittle bacon bits. Not only is there little malt residue, there's no alcohol heat either. All in all, it works. You just have to ignore the awful appearance.

I bought these as an experiement to give the brewery a try-out and I think I'll be buying more from them at the next opportunity. While the prosaic styles are fine, I think they have a rare flair for silly novelties.