Cluster F@ck
4 Hearts Brewing

Pours a gold colour, slightly cloudy. Head is white, large webbed bubbles, decent thickness. Looks OK.

Smells grainy, buttery with a bit of Pride of Ringwood hop note. Woody, slightly cardboardy but pretty blah. Could definitely use more edge.

Taste is grainy, with cereal notes, touch of bread and a big yeasty note. Grainy, not IPA enough at all. Weird base and just bland, bordering on unpleasant.

Decent mouthfeel, OK body with a touch of carbonation.

Not really IPA at all and just unpleasant flavours. Sorry, this doesn't really do it for me at all.

This is called a "Mild IPA", and perhaps rather misguidedly is modelled after Australia's cheapest, nastiest midstrength beer XXXX Gold. Well, each to his own, I guess—this supposedly at least ups the classic Cluster character and gives it the "craft beer treatment". Tried on-tap at the GABS festival in Melbourne.

Pours a deep golden colour, rather clear with a very light-weight body: not unexpected. Head if a full frothy ring of pure white fed by streaming light carbonation. It's not exciting, but it looks pretty decent.

Nose achieves what it sets out to do: but that's no good thing. Yeasty and thin, with no body—excessively mild and almost no distinguishable hop presence beyond a certain leafy tone to the grain husk water. Um, no...

Light and empty in the entry, with a faint sweet grain character... And that about all it gets to. It stays weak and bland, with just occasional swellings of yeast or seltzer water. Nothing on the aftertaste: weak, watery and awful.

Feel is extremely light with a yeasty cloy.

Overall, I was shocked at how bad this is when I tried it (and it was only later that I discovered it was somewhat inspired by XXXX), and even looking back on it now there was nothing redeeming about it. It was a very poorly thought out experiment, in my view.