Fruit, real and implied

It all seems business as usual at Whiplash at the moment, all fruited sour beers and hazy pale ales. Let's take a look at the most recent ones to come my way.

Fruit Salad Days are here again, this time with Watermelon added to the Berliner weisse base. I don't know why I was expecting it to be pink, but it isn't. A lesser brewery might have done that. Instead it's a pale cloudy shade of brass, unsurprisingly without a head: few of this style have those. The watermelon manifests in the aroma as a kind of green vegetal note, very real but very much the rind of the fruit, not the flesh. There's even more of that in the flavour, making it taste very much like biting into melon skin. The base beer provides little other than fizz, and there's a disappointing lack of sourness. The hops are El Dorado, but they could be anything. From the idea and the artwork, I see this as a well-intentioned gesture at solidarity with the Palestinian people but I don't think it really works as a beer, being neither one of the silly-but-fun sweet and syrupy efforts, nor a serious mixed fermentation buffet of bug-derived complexity. Be advised.

On to IPA, and Step Steadier, 6.8% ABV and exceptionally murky, making me fear the burn and the grit that so often comes with. Except, in proper Whiplash fashion, there's neither. It's softly textured and effervescent in the well-made New England style. Its flavour is a fruit salad mélange, incorporating pineapple, apple, grape and peach, suspended in syrup; sweetly fresh with no pointy edges. Bitterness doesn't really feature, and I'm sure that's deliberate. There's a tiny hint of garlic on the finish and a slight alcohol burn which are the only elements of the style's typical problems to manifest, and none of it is problematic. Otherwise it's a very decent take: doing the fruit in a way that haze is meant to. This is why we Whiplash.

The big guns today are Big Fluffy Clouds, loudly billed as an all-Nelson double IPA. Bring it, so. It's another opaquely orange job and the aroma doesn't deliver the huge Nelson hit I was hoping for. It's subtle, with only a mild spicy fruit effect, like clove-studded satsuma, but nothing fancier. Maybe because it was served very cold it didn't taste strong and I had to hold back on drinking it too quickly. Nelson is in its tropical era, bringing lychee, apricot, white plum and ripe pear. The harder mineral side is smoothed out into a mild fresh-milled pink peppercorn sensation. It is well named, being cloudy, fluffy and yet big also. Half way through I could start to feel the 8.2% ABV begin to warm my belly parts; it was understated before that. Overall, it's a beaut. I didn't get the hairdryer effect of full Nelson in the face, which I always enjoy, but complex and nuanced single-hoppers are rare, and this is one of them. Your mileage in can may vary, but the draught version absolutely sings.

Another reminder here from Whiplash that hazy IPA can be wonderful when all the regular pitfalls are avoided. I don't know a brewery that does them better.