Thicc

Getting mouthfeel into otherwise light-bodied beers seem to be the urgent issue of the day among IPA brewers. Oats are often pressed into service; likewise lactose has offered a shortcut to achieve the results that our daddies managed with mash temperatures and invert sugar. What happens if you pile all the modern techniques in together? Thankfully, BrewDog is here to show us.

Duopolis is billed as an "oat cream DDH IPA" which sounds like something hefty but it's only 4.7% ABV. It looks like a proper New England IPA, being a dense and opaque yellow, shading almost to green. The aroma is mild and mostly vegetal: a buzz of salad leaves with a splash of sweet dressing. The mouthfeel checks out, being properly smooth and custard-creamy. It is a little thin when compared against the 6%+ takes on the same style, though that does add to its drinkability: no extreme flavours or booze heat here.

The veg turns to fruit on tasting, becoming a smoothie of mango, kiwi and apple, but retaining a light peppery spice: fresh rocket and thoroughly matured kimchi. A vanilla sweetness lasts long into the finish. This is a bit of a Waldorf salad, but enjoyable nonetheless, the crazy twists restrained by that modest ABV.

Fans of The Modern IPA but looking for it in a mass-produced sessionable package obviously don't exist, but if they did they'd be all over this. Well done to BrewDog for carving out that niche.

Speaking of Modern IPA, BrewDog's first foray into this realm was Hazy Jane, back in 2017. I trekked all the way to their pub in Liverpool to try it. Since then it has been reformulated and re-released, the ABV brought down from 7.2% to 5%. You can still get the earlier one, under the name "O-G Hazy", but for the sake of completeness, and since new Hazy Jane was now on the shelves in Ireland, I thought I'd throw a review in here.

It's definitely toned-down. The texture is even a little thin, which shouldn't be happening. Tropical juicy stuff? No, not really. There's a hint of peach, some sweet red apple, and a mild lime bitterness. A certain savoury yeast-dreg is included too, but even this is low-impact. The alcohol in the first version seems to have really served a purpose and I completely understand why they brought it back because this is no substitute. Duopolis does a much better job of delivering the goods.

Quantum juice

It took Gail Ann Williams of the San Francisco-based Beer by BART blog to bring The Session around to the inevitable topic of New England IPA, a style which seems to be just clinging on as the current darling of the beer-geek-at-large. It is, of course, not without controversy, breaking many of the hard rules of brewing IPA in the American style, where cleanness was once king, and accepted as the best way to optimise quality hops. Now it's all about extreme late-hopping, getting the beer from the fermenter to the drinker in the shortest possible time, eschewing clarification, and the use of estery English ale yeasts to add body and mouthfeel.

I'm fairly agnostic on the merits of the whole process. When it works it makes wonderful-tasting (if butt-ugly) beer. But it seems that balancing the whole equation is a tough proposition and not every brewery is up to it. Often those fuzzy yeast and proteins will interrupt the delicate hop flavours; too much bitterness is another flaw that just throws the whole recipe out of whack. Juiciness is the name of the game, but it can be hard to pin down.

And then, sometimes, one encounters a New England IPA that does something completely out of the ordinary. With beers in the style coming thick (ha!) and fast, it's not difficult to sort them into the ones that get the formula right and the ones that don't. On a recent trip to Liverpool I encountered BrewDog's Hazy Jane, and from the first sip thought I knew which kind it was. It's typically unattractive, with a dense custard-like appearance topped by a desultory effort at a head, but the flavour immediately exploded outward in a riot of ripe tropical fruit: mango, pineapple, guava: all of that lot. I'm in for a good time here, I thought. The second taste introduced a seam of pine resin bitterness, still laying down those fresh hop vibes, but distinctly harsher and less New-Englandy. And that's where it settled. The only other complexity was a wisp of savoury yeast bite it would have been better off without.

It's entirely possible to appreciate this as a big West Coast hop-bomb, but just that tantalising flash of tropicality at the beginning had me expecting something more fun and fruity. I also have no idea why this strange phenomenon happened: was it just my sense of taste at fault, could I have imagined the mango? It's a beer of many questions, and maybe I need to give it another go. I leave it here as just another example of how diverse the New England IPA style can be, even within the flavour profile of individual beers. How Hazy Jane manages to exist in a state of both juiciness and bitterness is for better minds than mine to work out.

A note from the future: Hazy Jane was later reduced from the 7.2% ABV version reviewed here to 5% ABV. The stronger one was then re-released under the name "O-G Hazy".