#391: Non Stop Disco

 I drank almost nothing of great interest (to this blog) during the month of May. An Orval here or there, sure. Sagres from the can in Portugal, grand. Plenty of house Pils of course. One outlier was pulled from under the stairs, but more on that in the next post. 

This lassitude - a hiatus of beery curiosity - continued into June until the appearance of Galway Bay's Disco Paradiso in the local this past weekend. Two cans please, I usually like this sort of thing. Of particular interest was the method of steeping overnight the oats for this mash, presumably removing the cereal on brewday and using this oat milk as part of the liqour for the brew. I am as much an oat milk enjoyer and porridge enthusiast as I am an appreciator of oats in beer, particular a modern hop-forward style like this. Also of interest, on the topic of hops, is the use of Yakima Chief's proprietary Hyperboost hop extract in the dry hop (Strata) as well as a whirlpool addition of Nelson Sauvin.

It's 7.8% and it certainly looks milky, with a small enough cap of foam that, despite the reasonable level of carbonation disappears after 90 seconds, leaving the beer looking slightly ill in its flabby opacity. Not the most beautiful presentation, then. Far more beautiful is the aroma, promising mango and galia melon in spades, overripe and heady and sweet, like sticking the head into a freshly opened bag of hop pellets. This is generally delivered on the palate, but with something else too. The initial intense rush of super sweet mango - ripe almost to the point of tartness - alongside quieter notes of kiwi and grapefruit, is muscled out of the way by a buzz of hot hop dust. These are not the balancing IBUs of a heavily bittered DIPA but (at least to my palate) the sensation is of raw hop pellet. Look, I've been there. When you are around pelletised hops on a daily basis, basking in their aroma, you will be tempted to stick one in your mouth. When you do, you realise that the wonderful fruity complexity of the aroma is nowhere to be found, and in its place is a harsh dusty vegetal bitterness, almost acrid, with pale shadows of the pleasant characteristics barely detectible underneath. 

Of course, this isn't exactly what's going on in the beer; there's plenty to enjoy here but you have to accept that while you're eating your lovely syrupy sweet fruit salad there will be the occasional raw and underripe green pepper, and maybe a twang of garlic for good measure.

You might be forgiven for thinking I hated this beer, but I didn't. I had both cans in succession, clearly feeling there was a high in there worth chasing - the sheer intensity of hop delivery is a decent reflection of what was promised on the can. However, for the price of entry (€6+) I don't anticipate much further exploration. 

After waiting around six weeks to try an interesting beer, one finally comes along that is almost too interesting for its own good.