Hot and sour

I don't know what the deal is with "Ginger & Co", purported maker of this sparsely branded Ginger Beer. They've dealt with the requirement to put an address on the label by printing a bare Eircode, which turned out to be that of Hopfully Brewery. Is Hopfully concerned about their own name appearing on a different sort of product?

And it is a different sort of product. Malt extract is high on the ingredients list, but no hops, of course, and added pear juice, elderberry syrup, lemon zest and botanicals. The works. It's a pale pear gold in the glass, and the malt doesn't appear to be providing enough proteins for a head. For something made from all that fermentable sugar, it's quite heavy-bodied, dampening the fizz and reducing, I think, the refreshment power. It's definitely designed to refresh, the ginger and lemon harmonising in that way they do. There's a bonus floral complexity in the finish, doubtless down to the botanicals. I expected this to be a light and refreshing number, drinking it outside on a warm and sunny day, but its density means it's not. I can see this still being suited to winter as we head that way.

Back to your regularly-scheduled Hopfully, and there's a new gose in the No Cars series: Lemonade & Coconut Gose, presumably not very different from the Lime & Coconut version they did previously. It's 4.3% ABV and a hazy pale orange shade. According to the ingredients, it doesn't have any lemon, just lime, and that's very obvious in the foretaste which gives vibes of both Rose's Lime Cordial and lime shred marmalade: lime for people who have never actually seen the green lads in real life. There's a distinct creamy coconut side too, and a certain amount of minerality, but we're a long way from classic Leipzig gose. As an al fresco quaffing beer it's excellent, however. It tastes of lemonade and coconut, and is broadly gose-esque, so there's very little to complain about.

Two IPAs serve as a coda to this pair. Secret Handshake was created for Craft Central. It's all the hazy, 6% ABV and hopped with Talus, Citra and new Kiwi kid Nectaron. It's a medium orange colour and has great head retention, all white and fluffy. The aroma is quite pithy and there's a certain amount of that bitterness in the flavour. That's better than vanilla and garlic anyway, neither of which features. Instead you get a cool and juicy mix of mandarin, apricot and honeydew melon; deliciously thirst-quenching and scarily easy to drink. A bite of lime rind finishes it off. It's an excellent example of that style which everyone makes but few excel at. Perhaps Nectaron will be the hop to save us. 

Freefall at 5.3% ABV isn't wildly different, and certainly looks similar, though has a more down-to-earth hop combo of Citra, Centennial, Chinook and Simcoe. Time was, that would be a cause for excitement, but this is quite regular material: solidly enjoyable but not doing anything we haven't all had before. I liked how the Citra resists the fluffy haze by adding that bite of lime rind again to this picture, front and centre. That does a good job of muting the vanilla, which is relegated to the tail end. In the middle there's some decent but standard peach and apricot. Hopfully really seems to be getting the hang of this haze thing, and this one balances the genre's better features with some more old-school IPA attributes.

So not quite a totally new departure for the Brazilian lads in Waterford: the lower three here are very much the type of thing they're known for. And long may it continue.