Kihoskh Brett IPA Cherry Wine BA
Mikkeller ApS

 

Murky tan; chalk, diapers, + barn; white toast, some lemon rind, horse stall, tannic pits, peaches + a bit of a tropical end; light.

4 4.25 4 4 4

Brett huge on the nose, less so in the body. Cherry barrel more than pits - understated. I’d love to see this with more time on the Brett for it to bring pineapple. But interesting Brett IPA.

375ml bottle - a Brett-infected IPA, aged in cherry wine barrels - when will the madness stop? Ostensibly made for the beer-friendly supermarket in Copenhagen of the same name.

This beer pours a clear, medium salmon-tinged golden yellow colour, with three fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and fizzy dirty white head, which leaves some scattered sudsy lace around the glass as it slowly subsides.

It smells of funky white cheese, gritty and grainy pale malt, musty sour cherries, a generic oaken woodiness, and some mild and near-obfuscated leafy and piney green hop bitters. The taste is crackery and grainy pale malt, bland Brett funk, some increasingly hard to notice cherry pit fruitiness, further squashed citrus notes, wet wood staves, and more understated leafy, herbal, and piney hoppiness.

The carbonation is fairly tame after that big opening gambit, via its mopey frothiness, the body a so-so middleweight, and hardly all that smooth, not with all this shit going on. It finishes trending dry, as the funk, woody fruit, and third wheel hoppiness land with a thud.

Overall, I'm duly on record as saying that regular (or double) IPAs are absolutely fine the way that they are - they don't need to be blackened, whitened, soured, barrel-aged, or made 'sessionable'. Given the number of those attributes present here, it makes for a hard time finding something nice to say, and I'm in a lazy mood, so I won't.