Have we reached Peak Craft?

Do we really need a vanilla IPA?

Yes, I know, I should have known better, but there I was, studying the beers available in my local, and I spotted a new beer from Arbor, generally one of my go-to breweries. Trouble was, it was called Faked Alaska and the description explained that it was a vanilla IPA. I should have know it would be sweet, after all mango IPAs and milkshake IPAs did not get their names by accident. It tasted like a beer made with vanilla. And I did not enjoy it.

The problem I have with vanilla IPAs, and the like - well, there are two - is my feeling that the craft beer quest for novelty has led us into places that, in my view, were best avoided. 

The second problem goes as follows. I like fruity but I don't really care for sweet and increasingly the line between the two grows very thin. Also, any pale beer that advertises itself as ice cream, milkshake, vanilla etc, is pretty much guaranteed to be sweet. It probably started off as fruity anyway so the uber-sweetness or uber-fruitiness is going to be its selling point. Why do we have these styles? Do people really like them? I have to assume that they do.

The truth is that I'm simply baffled by this apparent fondness for sweet beers, whether they be pales, milkshake IPAs or pastry stouts. My taste is generally for drier, hoppier beers and the sharper the better. 

And yet...

I’m so bored with the IPA

But it’s true, I am getting bored with craft beer. We seem to me to have reached the point where your standard pales, IPAs, stouts, even many sours, taste more or less the same. It seems churlish to complain when there are so many more breweries around than there ever used to be but the market does seem to have become a victim of its own success.

It isn’t hard to connect the problem of sameness with the development of improbable and, to me at least, unnecessary, styles such as the milkshake IPA. Drinkers at the minute do seem to crave novelty and ambitious brewers are only too ready to give it to them. 

There are some hilarious examples of this, some real, some not so real. I bet I’m not the only beer fan who saw a tweet last year apparently from Tiny Rebel, arch-creators of the improbable, stating that they had developed a beer utilising Heinz hoops. Oddly enough, it appeared on 1st April last year. It was, of course, a hoax but the fact that they hoped that some drinkers might be fooled is perhaps significant.

Over on the true side of the spectrum, I still shudder at the thought of a beer I tried, around five years ago, created by Thornbridge. I was sure that I had read that its ingredients included cabbage leaves or something similar, but according to Untapp'd, Ruin Pale is made with "gin botanicals". Either way, it was horrible.

But before I get howled down by fans of chocolate cake stout and the like, I am not suggesting that innovation is a bad thing, nor that there are ingredients that should never be used in brewing (well, maybe tomato sauce – but I hate that anyway!) It is new ideas and methods that are going to keep the industry buoyant and a few sarky comments by the likes of me won’t make much difference. I do reserve the right to moan though!

Hands off Estonia!

I suppose it’s possible that between now and the end of the year I will come across a beer that blows me away in the same way as Chateau Noir, a wine barrel-aged imperial Baltic porter from Pohjala did, but I doubt it. Like a lot of beer drinkers, I rate pretty much all the beers I drink, in my case out of 10. In six years of doing so, Chateau Noir is only the second beer I’ve ever given a score of 8.5 (I’m famously hard to impress).


But this beer is no one-off. I first became aware of Pohjala some five years ago, when one of the themed boxes from Beer 52 contained several of their beers. At least two of them were memorable – the Kuld coffee porter and their Virmalised IPA. After that, I lost track of them, although I do remember a couple that Charita and I met on holiday in Budapest raving about Tallinn, recommending that we visit. It would be nice but my sense is that, in the current political climate, any country that shares a border with Russia, as Estonia does, is best avoided.

It was my fondness for imperial stouts and porters that drew me to Chateau Noir, when I scrutinised listings on the Beer Merchants website back in January. There were several for Pohjala, and Chateau Noir was my first. Here’s how I described it on Untapp’d:

“A standout beer. Classic imperial porter with rich chocolate and coffee notes but an arresting flavour of licorice to control the sweetness. Subtle undertow of red wine”.

Since this apocalyptic experience, I have ordered four further strong beers from Pohjala, and they’ve all been extraordinary, none more so than the curiously named Drayman’s Blend. It’s described as a barrel-aged stoutwine but, as my Untapp’d review suggests, there’s a lot more going on than that description conveys:

“Another frankly astonishing barrel-aged beauty from Pohjala, this one infused with whisky and Sauternes! It’s rich, sweetish, with dark chocolate and licorice notes. Fantastic!”

If you have any predilection towards imperial stouts and porters, you have to try Pohjala’s wares. The beers that I have been raving about are all part of their Cellar Series. If that’s not a guarantee of excellence then I don’t know what is.

Beers of the year part 1

And following on my Estonian rave, here's a round-up of my best beers of 2022, so far.This time it's all nations together, and my top ten, in no particular order, goes like this :
  • Pohjala (Estonia) - Chateau Noir (BA Imperial Baltic Porter) 12%
  • Pohjala (Estonia) - Drayman's Blend (BA Stoutwine) 11.5%
  • Downlands/Foghorn (England) - Not a Russian (Imperial Stout) 9%
  • Pilot (Scotland) - Imperial Scotch Ale (What it said) 12.6%
  • Northern Monk (England) - Double Heathen (DIPA) 10.5%
  • Elusive (England) - Bee Strong (BA Scotch Ale) 10%
  • Buxton (England) - Rain Shadow - Single Barrel (BA Imperial Stout) 12%
  • Thornbridge - Jaipur (IPA) 5.9%*
  • Burning Sky - Grass is Greener (IPA) 6%
  • Howling Hops - Tadpole Jackpot (IPA) 5.5%
BA = Barrel-aged.
*Back to its very best, IMHO

What can I say? I love strong beers! But now that in-pub drinking is back with a bang, and we're experiencing a summer of sorts, I'm going for lighter beers on cask and two recent crackers that I've had both have the name High Five/s and both are pales, one from Hand Brew (4.6%) and the other from Only With Love (4.2%). Both are excellent - try them if you see them!



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