Proper Potion #3
Ten Bends Beer

 

16oz can dated 12/2/20.

Pours cloudy yellow with a short head of white and minimal retention or lacing. Fruit cup juice in the nose with a hint of booziness. Pear, melon, peach, and tangerine. Medium bodied with a slightly tacky, slickish mouthfeel. Juicy tropicals on the palate with minimal malt or bitterness. Pear, peach, pineapple, and melon. Finishes fairly dry with lingering juicy tropicals.

This is my very first beer from Ten Bends, a new-ish brewery that's been around for four or so years in a commercial capacity. I've only very recently seen their stuff show up in stores in my area, and their beers seem generally well-received, so I'm hoping to be impressed. This is a NEDIPA featuring some cool hops: Nelson, Motueka, and the new-to-me Pacific Sunrise. Apparently, PS has been around for twenty years(!) but hasn't seen a lot of commercial use. Hope it does well in this beer and proves itself as an unsung NZ hop.

The pour here is pretty much what I expected, but a tad bit uglier and with less finesse to it than many better-looking stronger hazy DIPAs I've had. It's a yeasty/starchy looking beast, all pineapple-orange juice in color with full opacity and a thin, mediocre head that laces rather lazily. Not much in the way of legs and only small islands of surface coverage throughout, as well. Not impressed.

The nose is kind of uninteresting, as well. Seems like it might not be very thoroughly dry-hopped, because Nelson should really be punching me in the face here given that this thing is 8.7% ABV. I get some melon, apricot, key lime, punchy grassiness and a touch of dankness as well, but none of the unique Nelson character that I expect. Pacific Sunrise seems to highlight "jammy" notes with some florals, and that would be cool, but I don't get a ton of either here. It's even a bit metallic, which I can't abide. Overall, it's a let-down in the nose, too, which is frustrating.

On the tongue, this potion again feels anything but "proper." The world of strong NEIPAs is extremely crowded right now, and things like this are not really worth putting on shelves. Up front, it's cereal-forward with strong oatmeal vibes and a backend of lime, mango, and dank bitterness that nevertheless seems to collapse rather quickly. Yeasty and dense with a "healthy," B-vitamin-laden profile that just seems so par-for-the-course for this type of thing, and without any specific or strong hop character, it just kind of flounders on the palate in a lame and uninteresting way. I'm definitely not a big fan of this one at all; it just doesn't have anything going for it and seems to both under-utilize a great hop (combo, really, considering Motueka should really pop in something like this at the very least, even if Nelson isn't used correctly), and also not sell me on an exciting under-utilized NZ hop at the same time. Maybe I'd give one or two more beers from these guys a shot before writing them off, but as it stands, this isn't a good first impression to me, and feels like yet another dime-a-dozen NEIPA that throws its weight around without any cause to do so how it seems to want to.