Muree at The Offie had been telling me he would be getting some Flipside beers into the shop and how excited he was about the prospect and I didn’t pay much attention.
Last week I payed a visit and they had arrived so he made a point of pointing them out.
I was more interested in the difficult to get hold of Italian stuff, the Mikkeller and the De Molen that had arrived, but I bought a bottle anyway.
Oh boy am I glad that I did.
This IPA is superb.
It lounges about in your glass the colour of warm caramel and it smells of white wine and green English fruits.
The label tells me that this beer tastes of gooseberries.
“Yeah, right,” I thought.
But it does.
It’s like a big drunken gooseberry fool.
Oh and greengages.
And I mean intensely so.
There’s a great warming alcohol presence, though it doesn’t burn at all.
It just sits there keeping you company and getting you a bit drunk, like the bloke you meet in the pub whose stories are so good you keep going back to the bar for another, this beer should be in a 750ml bottle because 500ml is nowhere near enough.
The malting here is sweetly rich toffee coated digestive biscuits and there’s some heather honey in there too.
Towards the end you’re given a tongue curling dryness with citrus fruit pithy zest and a squeeze of orange juice, but man alive it’s still mainly gooseberries.
To the point that if you don’t like that particular fruit you may not enjoy this beer.
I for one think it’s absolutely fabulous.