Lervig: Cloudwater: I’ve Got Pils, Now What? (Norway: India Style Lager: 5.8% ABV )
Visual: Clear pale yellow with just the lightest amount of haze. Medium white bubbled head. Initially large amounts of carbonation that soon settle.
Nose: Soft lemon and lime notes. Clean. Light hop character. Bready.
Body: Bitter. Lemon and lime. Fresh but mildly so. Peppery. Moderate hops. Mild golden syrup. Vanilla toffee.
Finish: Lime cordial. Bird seed. Light bitterness. Brown bread baps. Noble hop oils. Soft lemon. Passion-fruit. Peppery. Sour cream later on.
Conclusion: You know, this is a lager but feels closer to an IPA than Brewdog’s Indie pale Ale did. Which isn’t saying much.
Ok, cheap shot out of the way, the heavy use of hop fruitiness that makes me think of an IPA with this beer also ends up giving this a very different mouthfeel to your average lager. It brings a fluffy hop mouthfeel as well as the big fruit hop flavor.
Despite that thickness of the hop feel, it does keep some of the lighter, easier drinking lager elements – it especially shows influence from its claimed pils style in a hop oil sheen that comes with it, accompanying a peppery character that nicely accentuates the bitterness of the beer.
A lot of heavily hopped lagers are good, but suffer as they feel like a weak IPA while also losing the advantages of the lager character to do so. This doesn’t entirely avoid that, in that it does kind of feel like a lighter IPA, but it manages to leverage the lager character better to make this refreshing and easy to drink.
So, not 100% a success, but very full of fruit flavour, and matches a good peppery character to the bitterness that benefits both while still keeping an easy drinking lager character. One of the better IPA/Pils style mash ups out there.
Background: Been enjoying the Lervig collabs recently – so decided to go for this one. Not done many lagers recently so it seemed like a good way to get back on that train. It seems that there is also a version of this called “I got pils, now what?” going around. I presume it is the same beer. This one was grabbed at Independent Spirit again. Decided to go with something from a smaller band to listen to while drinking this – Hate In The Box – Under The Ice. Kind of electro – goth – punk mix and nice one to return to.
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