Beer Moon Dog Mummy Have A Bite

Presumably launched to coincide with the start of the Royal Melbourne Show (or more likely because they had secured some calvados barrels), the second new release of the week from Moon Dog is touted as a Toffee Apple Amber Ale. In adding calvados to the list of barrels they've dragged through the brewery, pumped full of booze (and sometimes bacteria), emptied and released into the world - think shiraz, bourbon, whisky, rum, Cognac... - they set about recreating that tooth-rotting, appley-underneath treat of fairs and childhood. And certainly from the go they've achieved the toffee part of the deal. Whether you'll get much in the way from the apple brandy is less certain, with the effects of the two months in the barrels not as noticeable as in some of their prior oaky escapades. But you do get an imperial amber ale with lots of toffee and a surprisingly firm bitterness and as someone who always thought the apple part of a toffee apple something of a copout forced on children by cunning parents, surely that's the better part of the deal.