Lost and Grounded: Brave Noise Lager (England: American Pale Lager: 4.6% ABV)
Visual: Clear, lightly yellowed color. Good sized mounded white head. Moderate to a lot of small bubbled carbonation.
Nose: Fresh crusty white bread. Light sulfur touch. Light lime cordial touch.
Body: Sweet. Light honey sheen. Vanilla. Slight liquorice like backing. Slightly oily hop oil sheen. Crusty white bread. Mild mead.
Finish: Light chalk and flour touch. Mild bitterness and hop character. Vanilla. Hop oils and lightly resinous notes. Honey. Dried apricot. Mead.
Conclusion: This is not what I expected from my first impressions up front. On the eye it looked a pretty darn pale lager, and on the nose nothing really stood out beyond the usual lager character. So I have to admit I was expecting something kind of dull.
On first sip it was thicker than I expected from the pale, light and clear body – though admittedly by now I should know than to make assumptions based on that. It had more grip than I expected with a good level of hop oiliness and even a light amount of resinous notes in the finish. Very light, but there.
It is not heavily bitter, and the bitterness that is there is oily not prickly, but it is a nice gentle weight and shows a bit of a different style of hope usage than often comes from fancy takes on lagers.
Behind that is a fairly sweet base, from a honey sheen up front, through vanilla into dried apricot in the after effects. Combined with the oiliness it gives the lightest mead like imagery to the whole thing.
Now, before I put people off by making them think this is nothing like what they want, while it is a tad thicker, sweeter and oilier than the norm, this is still a lager. While it gets a tad more sickly as it warms up in this current absurd heat, when it is chilled down it is pretty easy drinking despite that extra weight, so still gives a freshening lager style.
Overall it is not bad, it seems much more a set of feels than flavours for the most part, but it has a lot of interesting character there. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t feel like one I want to have too often, more an interesting, quirky lager to occasionally indulge in than a mainstay.
And, that ain’t a bad thing at all to be.
Background: :Not done a lager for a while, or in fact many notes for a while. Trying to pull my thumb out. Anyway I saw this in Independent Spirit – a collaboration with brave noise beer, who are dedicated to a safe and inclusive environment in the beer industry without discrimination – something I can definitely get behind. Also it was waaaaaay to hot that week so a lager looked nice, but I’m going to claim the anti discrimination was the main cause. Had seen UK Subs warm up for Bad Religion in a gig recently so was listening to their “Before You Were Punk” compilation while drinking.