That said, I don't drink much of their beer. For today's post I picked three, all pretty chonky ones, to remind us that this model of brewing comes to us from the USA, where beer strength has little effect on beer price, and bigger is deemed better.Unusually, I'm starting with a double IPA. It's called Above the Clouds and, as the name implies, is hazy. The can neglects to tell us what the hops are, but I'm sure it's some typical combination, because the whole thing is very typical. You've got your tangy mandarin segments, leading to slightly sharper lime zest; you've got your soft and fluffy texture with a vanilla and pink-marshmallow sweet side; and you've got a touch of savoury, soupy dregs, providing a slightly uncomfortable amount of hot garlic. Although it's heavy and a full 8% ABV, the flavour isn't a long one and doesn't build or cloy. In fact, I sauntered through the 440ml of this in jig time, which is not my usual approach to double IPAs. It's fine; the sort of beer that would have been dead exciting in Northern Monk's early days, but we've all had plenty of them at this stage, and there's certainly no call to be importing this type of thing into Ireland from Leeds.
Let's switch to stout, so. Heaven has featured here before, at a tap takeover in 2020, at UnderDog's first iteration. This is the 2026 vintage and by the looks of things they've simplified it, so now it's your basic chocolate and maple imperial stout, with no barrel ageing. Indeed, it's even a bit light for the style, at just 8.4% ABV. Still, it pours handsomely dark and dense, with a nitro-like pillow of off white foam. The chocolate aroma can be smelled from several rooms away, and when sniffed up close offers the 5D Augustus Gloop Immersive Experience™. Unsurprisingly, it tastes of chocolate. Equally unsurprisingly, it tastes of absolutely nothing else. The caramel of a Mars Bar, the shortbread of a Twix and the peanuts of a Topic are the nearest things to complexity on offer from this liquid selection box. It doesn't suffer from the anaemic ABV either: it's full and gloopy, palate-coating and belly-filling. The only thing I felt it was missing was heat. A bit of snoozy winter warmth would have fitted it better to the chilly evening on which I opened it. There's a parallel to the beer above: it's competently made, but lacks character and individuality: the sort of features that attracted people like me to beers like this in the first place, a couple of decades ago.
Things get sillier with another 8.4% ABV imperial stout, so I'm assuming it's the same base. This is Even S'More Death, adding marshmallow and biscuit to the mix. It foams bigly and took a couple of goes to pour. The aroma is as unsubtle as one might expect, absolutely pumping out the chocolate and sweet strawberry tacked-on flavours. I guess nobody wants proper stout in something like this, so expect no bitterness. I never thought I would say this, but the flavour makes excellent use of the marshmallow. The pink fake-berry foretaste adds something resembling a tartness to a beer that's otherwise darkly sweet malt and frankly unnecessary dessertish chocolate. The different aspects do go to extremes, but they go together, and there's a degree of balance to the loud candyshop character on display here. While still being exactly the kind of beer it presents as, it also avoids any upsetting lack of cohesion. There's just enough roast to pull the chocolate fountain effect back from the brink of unpleasantness. A bit of coffee, for the tiramisu effect, or Amaretto almond, might have improved the overall picture, but I'm guessing those are just different Northern Monk beers. This one, as is, was simply good sticky dessert fun. That has a place.They all have a place, I guess, and one can't have too many strong stouts, even when they're adulterated with pastry flavours. I assume Northern Monk does plainer ones, and properly bitter IPAs as well. They're just harder to spot in amongst the noise of the imports fridge with all its novelties.
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