Dark deeds

Why do I take so long picking beers when I'm standing in front of the fridges in Redmond's? It's because I'm trying to piece together the theme for a blog post. Something about Thornbridge and dark beers, maybe?

Baize is presumably a reference to the brewery's nearest big city, Sheffield, being perennially associated with snooker. The green (three points) and the black (seven points) are respectively represented by mint in a 5.5% ABV stout. Lactose is the only other non-standard ingredient, standing for the cue ball, I guess. The aroma's mint is faint, no more than a waft from a freshly opened bag of mint imperials: processed and sugar-laden, not fresh. Although it's a milk stout really, the dairy sweet side is quite understated, and there's a proper balancing coffee and toast roast. They haven't gone overboard with the mint flavour, which is a pastey smear, like the inside mush of Fry's Peppermint Cream (ask your grandparents) rather than raw herb leaf. I prefer the raw herb leaf approach to mint in beer, so this didn't really suit me. It's fine, and no doubt successfully built for the mass market, or whatever mass market exists for mint chocolate stout these days. There's a pleasant creamy richness, placing it exactly on point for good, satisfying, stout. Its novelty side is best ignored, and I think it would be a better beer without it. The black is worth more than the green, as they say in brewing.

A porter is next: Panela, brewed with coffee and dried sugar cane (or "sugar" as it's also known), at 7% ABV. The head on this pure black beer is almost nitro-like: slow to form and luxuriously thick when it does. The coffee comes through in the aroma, though not in a gimmicky way, with not much to differentiate the added ingredient from the common effect of dark porter malts. It's subtle in the flavour too, and I think may contribute more to the texture than the taste, adding a pleasant oiliness to what I might otherwise consider a disappointingly thin body. The oil builds gradually on the palate so that by the end of the glass there's a noticeable coffee aftertaste. The main flavour is dry and roasty, with notes of charcoal and burnt breadcrust; the hops a metallic minerality. Overall, this is a solidly-made strong porter given just a slight novelty twist, which is frankly the best kind of novelty twist. Thornbridge's sober reliability wins out.

Finally, there's no deed darker than turning a perfectly innocent American-inspired IPA hazy for no good reason. I've always thought of Thornbridge as an upstanding and ethical brewery, so I've tended to just pretend Hazy Jaipur doesn't exist. Another boy did it and ran away, sort of thing. Facing up to reality, this is the same strength as real Jaipur at 5.9% ABV and is a very pale yellow shade with a light touch on the haze: I guess they couldn't bring themselves to fog it up completely. It doesn't smell hoppy, as such, with a bath-bomb combination of flowers and spices which is, I'm sure, largely hop-derived, but doesn't have the bright and citric quality that makes Jaipur what it is. Bitterness is what makes Jaipur what it is, and that has been dialled way back here. Hazy IPA should instead substitute fresh tropical fruit or an alternative juicy quality, but this doesn't. Instead, I got slightly sticky malt, which is the wrong sort of sweetness. That's the point where I checked the base of the can, and although it's within the brewery's stated best-before date, it was canned around ten months before I drank it. I suspect it was best well before opening. On the one hand, this disappointing and thoroughly un-Jaipurish experience is partly my fault for not reading the numbers, but on the other, the brewery has made it this way and doesn't seem to regard a problematic lack of hop freshness as a deal-breaker. Regardless of the details, the Jaipur brand is not well served with this extension. Other than the ABV, it has no features I associate with that classic of English IPAs.

I'm not sure which conclusion to draw from this. Either Thornbridge does its best work in classic beer styles and shouldn't go chasing craft-era gimmickry, or I'm becoming ever-more curmudgeonly and less tolerant of whippersnapper brewers trying to be creative. Could be both. I'll need a few more beers to settle this.