Achtung, IPA!

For all the talk of the craft beer era having ended, one company who brought it to the unlikely locale of Bavaria seems to be clinging on. I have two examples from Crew Republic of Greater Munich today, both in American styles, of course.

And of course they do haze now. Jackpot is the hazy IPA, a modest one at 5% ABV, and modestly hazy too. The aroma is an even mix of sweetness and citrus, like a creamy lemon dessert. It misses the mark on texture, being thinner than any hazy IPA ought to be, and reminding me of the early examples from Irish breweries, where nobody had quite got the hang of it yet. Though the citrus hops are still there, they bring only a token bitterness, which I guess is by design, but they don't bring much flavour either: none of the ultra-fresh spark, of juice and dank, that is the style's whole purpose. Instead, you get a limp and sickly vanilla sweetness and some floral-herbal bath salts, very much watered down. I fear Crew has not understood the assignment here, and made something which technically fits the specs for hazy IPA but is unconvincing to anyone who has drank one previously. The brewery was founded in 2011 and I think that they haven't fully adapted to beer's evolution since then. Maybe the next one will be better.

Drunken Sailor is a straightforward IPA, and the amber colour is altogether more 2011. There's still a little cloudiness, but not to New England levels. I hoped for more citrus but the aroma is all oniony, which gave it much less initial appeal. There's a proper American heft to this at 6.4% ABV, with that sticky toffee malt the old-school IPAs were based on. They then added a sparky citrus bitterness to that, but here it's more savoury -- the onions again -- finishing on a more orthodox hit of pine resins. This is absolutely true to the malt-heavy IPAs of the old west, but it's not an especially good example. Time may be a factor: they've put a 12-month expiry date on the can, and 11 of those had passed by the time I drank it. I suspect that there may have once been a fresher grapefruit or pine element to this, but it's gone now, resulting in a beer that tastes cooked and stale. Them's the breaks when picking randomly from off licence shelves. I wouldn't have it any other way.

There's promise here, and I am genuinely pleased that Crew are still at it, all these years later. I'd prefer if the importer shipped us more of their dark offerings however: we can do hops more freshly from our local breweries.