#333: After the Fall

This duo were part of a trio gifted to me by Lachie and Alison (thanks guys!) and comes from what was once their neck of the woods in Stirling.

The brewery is Fallen Brewing and there's a strong travel theme to the beers at hand, owing to their residence in a bona fide old railway station.

We start with New World Odyssey, which sounds nice. But then you read that it's a blonde, that broad and vague style moniker that brewers tend to apply to things that aren't exciting enough to call anything else and you wonder if your hopes for New World hop delivery are about to be dashed against the rocks. Thankfully they aren't, with fresh, zesty citrus getting up bright and early even if it is somewhat undercut by a considerable buttery diacetyl thing. This is swept up in the bitterness and thankfully doesn't last, with the malt half of the beer turning instead to more palatable bubblegum fruitiness. It's enjoyable, but it's far from the odyssey I was expecting.

Unlike Platform C, the IPA. These two seem to have switched bottles on the way across the Irish Sea because I'd expect an IPA to be fraught with the dangers of too-thick malt and diacetyl interference and I'd expect the blonde to be, well, more blonde, pale and clean. OK, it may not be paler, but Platform C is by far the cleaner of the two, with a perfect base of soft, subtle biscuity malt allowing a gorgeously expressive and juicy C-hop character drive the beer. Fresh and punchy with its grapefruit flesh for the first half of the bottle, candied orange sweetness for the warmer second half, but never losing the clean control. This is the kind of thing I wish all brewers would strive to achieve with their American pale ale and IPA releases, an execution the likes of which I've seen from Althea and Little Fawn among others here in Ireland.

Despite the respective names of these beers, it is the IPA that takes you on the New World odyssey while the blonde is still playing catch up.