Third Barrel's Dublin pub, The Christchurch, is continuing to do its most important job of bringing us new Third Barrel beers as and when they happen. And they've been happening a bit, recently.The official description for Nothing To See Here is pineapple, but the combination of Galaxy and Idaho 7 tasted more like mango and lychee to me. Still, you get where we're coming from: think tropical. Although a hazy IPA, it's only tokenistically hazy. It shows its 6% ABV in both the texture -- full-on NEIPA fluff -- and the taste, which includes an assertive stonefruit-skin bitterness along with the plentiful soft and ripe fruit. I liked this bitter bite in what's otherwise a cuddly bear of an IPA, fading into tropicality after the initial smack. Third Barrel excels at this kind of thing, so rather than try to reach an insightful conclusion I'll just say that if you like how they go about their business in general then this is them doing what they do. As you were.
I've started to read "west coast IPA" as more of an untested claim than a description when I see it. The brewing industry has driven me to this. So when I ordered Westbound & Down my first, sad, task was to assess it for style fidelity on your behalf. This one stacks up, I'm happy to say. It's pretty damn clear and a nicely deep shade of gold. It wears the bitterness up front, with pine intensity reaching almost zinc-like minerality in the foretaste. That's invigorating and mouthwatering, just as big bittering hops ought to be. The beer is impressive at only 5.9% ABV: it could pass for a notch or two stronger. There's further complexity on offer after a couple of minutes, the pine turning to a softer herbaceous dank and a contrasting note of mango and pineapple. I found surprisingly little citrus going on, but it's not really missed. West coast test passed, with room for error. Lovely stuff.
New under the Hopsicle label is Juicebox Hero. We're back on the haze here, and this time there are no compromises. The flavour is packed with huge notes of vanilla, mixed with clanging garlic. There's a stated goal of being sessionable, and it's only 4.3% ABV, but it's thick and gloopy, and unpleasantly hot, so while the numbers are on point, the taste is not. To be fair to it, there was a faint echo of fresh and juicy mandarin, hiding at the back of the flavour, but not enough to redeem the beer overall. This is pure New England napalm, which I'm sure has its fans but I'm not one of them. Marks off, then, for missing the mark on the sort of beer it's supposed to be, and for general unpleasant murk qualities. I hope the Cork bars who commissioned it were happy with what they got.Still, a two-out-of-three hit rate isn't bad, as these things go, and the one miss was more my personal taste than any flaw in the brewing. It might have been nice to have something other than IPA, however.
