Beer Moon Dog Mr Mistoffelees

Now this is a weird one. And not just because it's a beer from Moon Dog. No, because when we first sampled Mr Mistoffelees at last year's Great Australian Beer SpecTAPular, we found it to have an unpleasant characteristic that rendered it, to the Crafty palate at least, undrinkable. That it went on to be voted one of the most popular beers at the event was a surprise, one we put down to the fact that some beer nerds just want to love anything different or that we had yet to unlock some part of the Crafty mouth-brain synaptic highway that would allow us to understand such characteristics. This current release is to the same recipe yet is unrecognisable from the one we sampled 11 months ago, so presumably we got a beer from a bad line, a mouthful of yeast or God knows what. Certainly, back then, we weren't hit by the sort of fruity aroma that Phil Spector would create if he'd spent his life creating fruity aromas for beers instead of walls of sound, crazy hair and dead women. Because that's what Mr M is delivering here - tonnes of passionfruit and mango up front to entice you in before a gentle, puckering tartness takes over. In fact, such is the fruity explosion that the effects of the various wild yeast strains and six months of barrel-ageing on this cloudy orange beer play a supporting role rather than taking centre stage; just like Phil Spector to The Ronettes, in fact.