Little Derivative
Annex Ale Project

 

 

650ml bottle - at least these guys have a sense of humour about how they keep making the same style over and over again. New England IPA, that is.

This beer pours a murky, medium banana yellow colour, with three fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and bubbly off-white head, which leaves some decent random cloud form lace around the glass as it slowly seeps out of sight.

It smells of gritty and grainy cereal malt, some orange, white grapefruit, and lemon citrus peel, wet sidewalks, faint tropical fruity notes, and some weedy, leafy, and piney green hop bitters. The taste is bready and doughy pale malt, mixed domestic citrus rind, some still indistinct exotic fruitiness, a strong damp minerality, and more leafy, weedy, and mildly dank piney hoppiness.

The carbonation is fairly active in its palate-probing frothiness, the body an adequate middleweight, and mostly smooth, with just a soupcon of hop acridity exacting a minor tithe here. It finishes trending dry, the malt ceding the floor to the mixed citrus and forest floor detritus esters.

Overall - yes, this one's name is certainly apt, yet not in a particularly bad way. They have just approached things a little differently - instead of having a 'series' of, say, IPA releases, they just rename it when they (ostensibly) change up the hop schedule. At any rate, this, like its predecessors, is pretty damned good.