Ode to Wallflower Pale Ale
Powell Street Craft Brewery

 

650ml bottle - this is their 'ode to Citra', aged in a local distillery's gin barrels for an unspecified amount of time.

This beer pours a slightly hazy, medium copper amber colour, with three fat-ass fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and bubbly off-white head, which leaves some decent dissipating cloud form lace around the glass as it lazily subsides.

It smells of gritty and grainy pale malt, a lesser caramel sweetness, increasingly pungent green botanicals (I'm not going to list all of those in yer typical gin, but you get the idea - ok, a lot of juniper, and a lot of indistinct citrus peel), some weird rosemary and thyme spice that reminds me of Thanksgiving turkey dinners past, and further piney and grassy green hop bitters. The taste is grainy and crackery pale malt, more heady gin barrel acerbity, a sort of free-range toastiness, some muddled domestic citrus pith, and more understated earthy 'seasonal' spicy notes.

The carbonation is adequate in its palate-coddling frothiness, the body a so-so middleweight, and not particularly smooth, not when there are all those gin-forward esters flitting about, fucking with my better senses. It finishes trending try, just like the guest demon's liquor.

Overall - I gotta say, I've had a few gin-barrel aged brews in the past (typically European in origin), and none of them have come even close to the intensity of this offering. Kind of challenging, if this old-school boozy thing isn't um, your thing, but worth a shot if you're open to new, er, things.