Mills: Standing Beer (England: Sour Ale: 7.5% ABV)
Visual: Cloudy lemon juice body with a thin white dash of a head.
Nose: Horse blankets. Oats. Dry raisins. Black and white pepper mix. Apricot skins.
Body: Tart apple juice. Tart lemon. Dried sultanas and oats. Fluffy hop feel. Apricot skin. More evident dark fruits over time.
Finish: Tart lemon. Fluffy popcorn hops. Tart cider. Popcorn feeling bitterness and earthy bitterness. Vanilla. Dry sherry over time.
Conclusion: Ok, this reminds me a bit of the dry hopped lambics I have encountered, very rarely, over the years. However, with one or two stand out exceptions of those lambics, this seems to be far more enjoyable and easy to drink than most of my encounters with them.
The thing that often hurts those beers is that, unless used very well, the hops can often feel out of place, or slightly acrid, hurting rather than adding to the beer. Here it feels like a robust hug of hops that adds more traditional beer like layer to the sour beer style, balancing the two well.
The base beer has lots of sour apple touched notes that feels like the cider influenced that the Mills beers have often played with but matched with that oaty and horse-blanket character that a lot of lambics wear. It creates a mix of the familiar style alongside something new, and then you continue to the hop use as a third layer.
It is easy drinking yet over time there is a surprising dash of dark fruit, dried raisins like and every dry sherry notes that make it feel weighty despite the ease of drinking. It is probably a good thing it has that extra weight as at 7.5% abv it could be very dangerous to drink otherwise.
Nicely balances sourness and hops, easy drinking and complex. Very well done, I kind of wish it was a tad lower abv so I could drink more of a session of it, but very welcome as a drink as it is.
Background: Got to admit I was unsure what beer style to put this under, to quote the official copy “brewed in the summer and fermented with ale yeast in our coolship at ambient temperatures. The wort is made from barley, spelt, rye and European hops. Maturation takes place in large oak casks with wild yeast and bacteria, until the winter. Finally the beer is dry-hopped with whole-leaf hops and bottle conditioned for several months before release.“. I’ve seen a few places list it as “Part Belgian pale, part farmhouse ale, part 19th century IPA.” So, erm, its kind of sour, shoving it under sour beer, job done! Not had a Mills beer for ages, I think this is intended to be their new standard release, rather than the mix of one-off releases of past years, so was interested indeed to give it a try. Grabbed from Independent Spirit, I decided an odd beer like this deserved some Sisters Of Mercy: Floodland as backing music.
