Farm boys

Thanks to the good offices of Craic Beer Community I got to visit Ballykilcavan during the summer. The Co. Laois brewery is more than just vessels and hoses, it's also a farm, a sustainability project and an ethos -- all the talk is very much walked here. They had just canned a new beer, Cobbler's Castle, which was handed out on arrival. I was too busy with the walking and the listening and the looking to take any notes, so decided I would revisit it as soon as I saw it in shops.

That took longer than expected and it was almost two months before I found it in the wild. It's a 4.8% ABV IPA boasting tropical fruit flavours. Maybe it had them two months previously but it seems to have drifted firmly towards the west coast since. The amber colour is one indicator of that, along with a rich seam of crystal malt giving it a caramel base. The hops on top are quite sharply citric in the grapefruit and lemon peel way. I was expecting this to build in intensity but, as befits the modest strength, it fades away decently quickly. This is session strength IPA in the way it used to be: that slightly resinous feel, familiar from the likes of Porterhouse Hop Head (an avatar of Brendan Dobbin's Yakima Grande), now out of fashion but still missed by the likes of me. It was nice to revisit before returning to the 2020s.

Here comes the haze, then. This is Clancy's Cans #12: Nelson Sauvin IPA, a little on the amber side again but decidedly cloudy. It smells fancy and tropical, all cantaloupe, guava and passionfruit: not casually so, but thick and ripe. The mouthfeel is weighty too, a little more than one might expect from 5.3% ABV. All of that runs the risk of it tasting too sweet, but luckily Nelson has our back. While the fruit is still very much present, there's a solid injection of the hop's flinty mineral bitterness to dry it out sufficiently to ensure balance and drinkability. It's no masterpiece of complexity but it's a good expression of Nelson and should keep its fans happy. I wouldn't have objected to a bit more, mind: it's a special edition, after all.

A very solid pair: par for the course with this brewery. It's well worth a visit if you happen to be down Laois way during the summer months. Details here.