Odds, sods and Kiwi hops

Today's selection comes from Oddity, the Barcelona-based brewing entity which uses the facilities of Whiplash in Dublin. I'm never sure whether they count for my goal of drinking as many Irish beers as I can get my hands on, but today they do.

We start light and breezy with The Gardener, described as a "zested table beer", being 3.8% ABV and including lime zest in the ingredients. It's a murky yellow shade, as table beers usually are, with quite poor head retention despite oats appearing in the ingredients as well. Zest is definitely a feature of the aroma, and it's the intense oily sort which could only be real lime. That gets sweeter on tasting but is no less prominent. It's the concentrated citrus you get in marmalade or hard candy, sitting right up front. Alas there isn't much behind it, the brewery interpreting the table beer style in quite a bland way, offering little more than a dry crispness and some slightly earthy rustic tones. I can see why they decided it needed punching up with fruit. I'm not sure this quite works as the easy-going refresher they've intended it to be. The lime is too punchy and tacked-on, while the base beer isn't clean enough, leaving a grainy residue on the palate. Perhaps bigging up the hops would have worked better.

Oddity is no stranger to the hop, as we'll see in the next three. That begins with Golden Hour, a pale ale. Again the head is problematic, with no more than a combover of bubbles, dispersing not long after pouring. Beneath, it's a densely murky pale yellow. Motueka features in the hops alongside two Americans, and dominates the picture, giving that typical medicine-cabinet herbal effect to the aroma. The flavour is more balanced, with an even mix of tropical fruit, meadowy flowers, peppery spice and a citric zest which is very much of the hop kind. Tagging along like an annoying younger sibling is the sweet vanilla typical of hazy pale ales and which contributes nothing useful. I don't mind it, and the blousey Motueka more than makes up for unwelcome noise. This is the easy-going refresher I thought the previous one would be. My only actual criticism is the ABV which, at 5.4%, is a point or so higher than the beer tastes. I'm only drinking one, and enjoying it, but I would be discouraged from doing a full session on it.

IPA next, and we're promised west coast from Between the Dots. Of course it's hazy, though only slightly. A different Kiwi hop, Riwaka, is utilised, keeping the more typically west coast Simcoe company. That gives us dank in spades: a hard resinous aroma with sweet spices, which speaks of grass in both the literal and slang meanings. It doesn't veer too far from that in the flavour, though the malt helps balance things by adding a softening richness, turning pithy bitterness to a more smoothly juicy vibe. It's a nice mingling of savoury adult flavours and sweet youthful ones. Like the above, the complexity is allied with an easy drinkability, though you would know it's all of 6.5% ABV and it demands to be treated with a commensurate level of respect. Motueka and Riwaka occupy an overlapping space in my hop literacy so it was interesting to discover, based on these last two beers, that I'm much more a fan of the latter. This may not be as assertively bitter as a classic west coast IPA, but it's beautifully clean, allowing the hops to do their thing unimpeded.

We leave the New Zealanders behind for the double IPA, favouring an all-American mix of Mosaic, Strata and BRU-1. Deep Resonance (ommmm!) is 8% ABV and a reasonably dark and dense-looking orange. Hazy, I need not even note. It doesn't have much to say in the aroma, only a broad boiled-vegetable smell with a hint of orangeade. The flavour, too, is rather plain. The hops take a back seat while the malt drives, giving it a wholesome and chewy base. That's quite satisfying to drink, but I felt entitled to some hop fireworks and instead it's a damp squib in that department. I had to check the best-before in case I had been sold an elderly pup, but the brewery reckoned it would be fine into 2025, so it wasn't that. It's by no means a bad beer, and there's a hint of fun spice in the flavour if you look closely, but it's otherwise rather vapid and lacklustre. Quite the anticlimax, and I expected better from both Oddity and Whiplash.

I didn't expect any stinkers from this lot, and there weren't any, but the set was bookended by beers which didn't sit right with me. The middle two were great, but not enough to generate much of a halo around the whole Oddity project.