Wylam: Revenge Of The Green Butt Skunk (England: IIPA: 8.4% ABV)
Visual: Cloudy lemon juice coloured body with large white mounded ice cream like head.
Nose: Resin. Grapefruit. Oily bitterness. Cannabis touch.
Body: Oily. Resinous. Black liquorice. Custard cream biscuits. Lots of hop oils. Sticky. Squeezed orange. “dank”. Slight smoke wisp. Vanilla custard.
Finish: Sticky. Kumquat. Resinous. Bitter. Grapefruit. Pineapple.
Conclusion: Often I have not been on board with the cloudier side of the IPA range – there is always an overhanging shadow of the NEIPA style and low hop bitterness which is generally not my thing. This is by far not the cloudiest IPA I have seen but initially I was nervous.
I should not have worried, as the name promises, this opens up resinous, oily and bitter. The aroma mainly just works with those notes, though with the promise of a grapefruit release hidden in there. It is when you take the first sip that things really start to get going.
It is the perfect balance between thick and dry feel – there is a vanilla custard weight but it still feels slight attenuated in a way that makes it sweet but not so much it gets in the way of a thick, oily, “dank” set of notes. The only bit that isn’t 100% for me is the oily liquorice coming out, but as it is done here I can live with it.
What really makes this beer work though is the finish. It is still oily, still bitter, but after a while that grapefruit that was there in the body and aroma, but temporarily absent in the finish, comes back with a bit of extra strength that grant a brief respite from the whole weight of the oily resinous hops that is delicious and really makes you both want to take a moment to appreciate it and also take another sip to enjoy that bitterness anew.
That release takes it from a good beer to an amazing one. Those fresher grapefruit notes, along with the slight extra sweetness from the higher malt allows it to manage much more oily bitterness that it would otherwise be able to do without getting rough and lets this beer go so much further.
An amazing DIPA, get it, love it.
Background: This is a beer I have been meaning to do notes on for a while. I have had several cans of this and each time they vanished deliciously before I could do notes on them. So, this time, another can bought from Independent Spirit, with a determination to actually do notes on it this time. This is a rebrew as a result of a poll of fans to see which DIPA special should be remade and I think the original was a brewed up version of what was originally an IPA. I could be wrong. Googling is not helping me here. Anyway, made with Galaxy, Nelson Sauvin and Citra, that is a nice set of hops. Went with Bad Brains self titled album for backing music. Yep still on an early 80s punk kick.
