When it comes to Lost Palm's latest IPA, I’m not sure the word "hazy" quite covers it. This beer is weirdly opaque. Like an orange-coloured version of when you have an iced latte then all the ice melts, or a cup of milky tea with the tea bag taken out quickly.
Not that it tastes like those things. No, it tastes like someone’s spiked the fruit punch at the school dance. You’re sipping on your punch and tasting orange juice and mango and nectarine and a little passionfruit tang, and there are some prickly bubbles in there keeping your tongue distracted, and you’re chatting up your crush so it takes a little while before you realise: there’s booze in this. A decent amount, too, based on the punchiness of this punch, also known as Quick Thinking Riwaka Citra Cascade IPA.
In fact, it’s then you notice there’s also some bitterness and spice and bread malt flavour in your drink as well. Someone hasn’t just put alcohol into the fruit punch; they’ve replaced the whole thing with a big glass bowl of hazy IPA. Quick Thinking indeed.
Then we get to Turnstiles Quad Blueberry Pancake Sour Ale, and things are just getting ridiculous. After a release that doubled their blueberry pancake beer efforts last year, the Lost Palms crew said: “You know what we need at a time like this? More blueberry pancake.” And that’s what Turnstiles is. More blueberries. More vanilla. More lactose. More alcohol. More frickin’ everything.
I hope you like having someone ram a couple of glazed blueberry danishes up your nose, because that’s what you get with this beer. The maple and vanilla and increased booze come in heavier than the sourness, making this version taste thicker and sweeter than its smaller predecessors, which is hardly surprising.
Oh, and did I mention it tastes a bit like blueberries? Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise either, since the brewers threw over 200 kilograms of blueberry puree into this beer. Considering, those little punnets of blueberries you get from the fruit shop only hold 125 grams, 200 kilograms is the equivalent of, like… a lot of punnets. I’ll leave you to do the maths.
Mick Wüst
Published February 28, 2023 2023-02-28 00:00:00
