La Sylvie'cious
Brasserie Le Paradis

 

 

33cl brown bottle purchased from Cave à Bulles in Paris. Label is cool, which is I think why I bought it: it has a kind of comic grunge to it that I tend to associate with good beers. Let's see how that works for me.

Pours a fairly bright and clear golden colour, with a fine but filmy head of white, that didn't form much beyond that despite a fairly aggressive pour. Lacing is fine and spotty. Body is pretty light. Looks decent enough.

Nose is... hoppy, in a generic US way. Certainly a fair bit of west coast C-hops (EKG, Cascade and Chinook, they say on the label, in fact), giving some pine and resin. Citrus is limited. Almost no basis though: nothing sweet, nothing malty at all, which means that the hops are a lone note in a desert. Or like the revving of a low-cc Vespa in an abandoned parking garage. Don't get me wrong: the hop fragrance is nice, it's just there's almost nothing else to go with it.

And the taste is what backs this up. Really, there's so little body and malt to the beer that it almost tastes watery. It's thin and clean, with an echoing, slightly metallic clang of hops over the top. More resin, a little menthol and some peely citrus come through, but there's not a lot else. However, the beer really doesn't feel unbalanced even so. There's a cleanness to it, and a bitterness that's quite well restrained: it never gets too much for the (admittedly very minimal) malt to handle.

Overall, it's pretty drinkable, and the hops are always at least fairly flavoursome. There's not a lot of complexity though: so the hops have to do all the work in keeping you interested—without the interplay of different characters, this is a tough job. Still, I liked it well enough. It's certainly a beer I could see myself ordering again if the opportunity arose.