Gross to the most

I'm guessing the San Sebastián brewery is not intending to do a lot of exporting to the USA. Or maybe they just like the idea of selling English-speakers cans with GROSS written down the side in huge capitals. Anyway, were I not a hardcore beer nerd who cares little about branding aesthetics, I might be off-put by this one. Instead, I bought three tins to see what they're about.

First out is Ctrl + Alt + Supr, following what seems to be an unfortunate recent trend of making beer names unpronounceable. As if this weren't all complicated enough already. It's in the unlikely style of Altbier and, although not completely clear, is a beautiful mahogany brown colour. The aroma offers autumnal hedgerow fruits with light woody spices and a hint of sweeter chocolate or caramel. It's quite thickly textured, and while 5.1% ABV is on the strong side for an Alt, it seems to have a much higher finishing gravity than is normal for the style, lacking any of the crisp lager edge. Instead, the flavour lays the chocolate on thickly, with the dark berry effect adding a certain tartness. A quick finish is the one nod to warm-fermented lager, but otherwise it seems like more of a brown ale to me. Not that it's a bad beer by any stretch: the warming richness was appreciated on the chilly evening when I drank it. I'm not sure that Alt is quite in the brewery's wheelhouse, however.

The inevitable New England-style IPA is called NPC and is 6% ABV. Time was, a beer that made the hopping a selling point would tell you what the hops were. This can doesn't, but is happy to say it's "thiolized", which I guess is a sort of lupulin dog whistle: if you know, you know, and also have €8 you're happy to spend on it. The ingredients list also includes grape skin, presumably referring to the proprietary hop-enhancer Phantasm®. Another new ridiculous beer fashion is kicking in.

It's the customary beaten-egg yellow and the aroma doesn't waft hops at me; smelling instead of dry and crisp wheaty cereal with a garnish of raisin or marmalade shred. Intriguing. The flavour is very savoury, giving me dusty Shredded Wheat and brown onion skin. There's nothing here that expresses the wondrousness of hops, nor what modern hop-focused breweries do with them. There's a very broad sweetness, like the sort of gooey 1980s dessert which came in a packet, needing whisked up with milk. It may be fully thiolized, but it isn't very good. There were seven months to go before the stated expiry date, so if freshness is the issue then their labels are a problem. But it may be that this is just a poor recipe. I find it difficult to believe that even the most ardent haze-pilled fanboi will enjoy what's on offer here.

Finally, the black IPA. Oswald is 7% ABV, properly black though spotted through with unattractive lumps of brown gunk. The aroma is nutty and spicy, more like cola than IPA. A thick texture starts me immediately thinking of stout, aided by a heavy roasted bitterness. It takes a moment for the hops to come through that, and they're more floral than citric, bringing rosewater and honeysuckle. There's more nuttiness too, of an oily pecan or cashew sort. A long residue of dark chocolate and Turkish delight provides plenty of value as a finish. I thought I preferred my black IPAs bitterer than this, and perhaps this is an epiphenomenon from the haze craze, that black IPA is becoming soft and sweet too. But much as it shouldn't work, it's absolutely beautiful, showing a lot of the joyous features of export-strength stout, but with lots of fresh hop topnotes. I'll take another one like this, please.

Guess I'll be sticking with the dark beers when next I'm feeling GROSS.