A Rocky start

My first time drinking beer from the Franco-Coloradan brewery Outer Range, I thought it was something else. It's not my fault, it's what it was sold as: a 5% ABV pale ale from an Irish brewery. That was surprising and noteworthy because it didn't taste or feel like one, and that's because Swells is actually a 10.5% ABV triple IPA. Happily, the parties involved cleared up the confusion within a day.

On pouring (yes that's a dirty great pint), it seemed a bit beige: murky in an unappetising vomit-like way. But I didn't buy it to look at it. The aroma is spectacularly tropical, blazing with concentrated mango, pineapple, passionfruit and all the rest of them. It's thickly textured to the point of feeling like a smoothie shake, as one might expect given the strength. I'd love to say that the fruit sensation transfers seamlessly to the flavour, but it doesn't quite. The sweet tropical thing is still at the centre, accompanied by a slather of even-sweeter vanilla, and then around the edges there's an unfortunate twang of garlic and stale sweat; a dry savoury quality that interrupts the sweetness instead of complementing it. Azacca, Simcoe and Columbus, in case you're wondering. Before, and indeed well into, the haze era, what triple IPAs I met could be depended on to be cleanly hot, and generally not too difficult to drink. I think this one is for those with a higher tolerance for hazy off-flavours than I possess.

Next, we'll start back at basecamp with a standard hazy IPA, a mere 7.1% ABV, and called Rayon de Soleil. It looks pretty similar to the big lad: an opaque yellow. It's nowhere near as thick, of course, and the aroma is spicy and herbal,  suggesting crisp green cabbage and rocket. To taste, it's sweeter: offering typically NEIPA-esque vanilla given a glaze of honey or golden syrup. Overall it's quite unremarkable and I've tasted plenty of beers just like it, from both France and the USA (these, I'm told, were brewed on the French side). It wasn't so extreme as to test my tolerance for garlicky vanilla murk, though the sweet aspect did get a little cloying on the end. I'm glad they didn't serve me a pint of this one.

Predictably, it's the double to finish: Forever Glades, although it's only a tiny step up from the basic at 7.6% ABV. (I blame the BJCP for putting an arbitrary border between the styles at 7.5%. And the brewery for paying attention to the BJCP.) Anyway: is it murky and yellow, you ask? Hell yes. And while it wasn't too overpowering in the previous two, garlic features massively here, in addition to all the bad stuff about this sorely stubborn genre of beer: too much heat, even though it's unashamedly strong. I will grant that there's a pleasant centre, with mandarin and honeydew melon, but the hot gritty muck around it renders it moot. This is very much a nope from me.

There are so many beers like these. Why is anyone importing them? This is why you rarely find foreign murk on this blog: I could fill it with nothing but if I wanted to but I respect you too much to keep posting the same, valid, criticisms about substandard overpriced hazy IPA.