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maandag 1 juni 2015

HoppySlosh Tastes: Leffe Royale IPA

There are certainties in life.

Death.
Taxes.

Lemmy.
Regardles of what day it is, or which way the earth spins, some things can be relied on to always be around. 
Whether they're a good thing is sometimes debatable (unless they're Lemmy), but generally speaking, their reliability is a source of (sometimes bleak) comfort for mankind.

At least less bleak than the constant fear of the snake winning one night.
Sometimes, however, certainties are depressing as hell.

Story in case:
AB-Inbev is launching a massive summer campaign, extolling the virtues of hops. 

"Superior selection of hops from around the world".
In case the stencilled bottle was too subtle.
Hops are hip, at least to the stiffs in suits who run AB-InBev. From the confines of their office buildings, they've been watching the world outside go by, while the factory below churns on. And every once in a while, they overhear whispered conversations between their minions, and they hear rousing talk of hops, and flavour and something called IPA.

"We must capitalise on this idea", must have been their reasoning. "We must have an IPA of our own".

"Even if we know jack shit about IPA"
Regardless of the exact definition (*) of an IPA, the general consensus seems to be one of hop-forwardness. Of intese flavours, and of boldness and attitude.

*) which I'm willing to keep liberally open for debate but will come back to at a later point

None of these are qualities I tend to associate with the Leffe brand, but I'm always ready to challenge my own preconceptions. 

Even when they're actually jsut observations.
Trying my best to be as unattached as I can be to all notions about IPA, hops, or even beer, I sampled both versions of Leffe Royale the other day, to find out what all those huge billboards are raving about.

My findings can be summed up as such:

Blech.


First off was the Leffe Royale Whitbread Goldings. 


Will you just look at all that hoppy hoppiness!
Fairness where fairness is due: this beer is not marketed as an IPA. It comes with lots of hoppy pretenses though, from its overly fanciful tinfoil wrapping with its golden hops flowers, to the back blurb (*) extolling the hop-forward focus of the beer itself.

*) I'll get back to the blurb, I promise.

But fairness goes both ways, and in all fairness, I have to say that this beer reeked.
It stank.
It ponged so much that even The Missus (*) could smell it whilst she was frying onions in the kitchen, causing her to exclaim (and I'm not even paraphrasing here)

"It stinks like a bad pub serving three-weeks old stale beer"
--The Missus

*) who doesn't like beer but is still perfectly capable of distinguishing subjectively (°) bad beer from objectively (^) bad beer
°) polarising beers which, plainly put, aren't everyone's taste.
^) bog-standard beer which, equally plainly put, isn't any good.

I sniffed and smelled and inhaled and simply could not detect any trace of yumminess in the pap-like, syrupy swamp wafting from the glass into my nose. I have rarely, if ever, smelled a less appetising beer than this, and Saint Arnoldus knows I've smelled a few.
In the mouth, the beer caused my natural curiosity to riot against my instinctive self-preservation. It's hard to get it down, and perhaps harder still to keep(*) it down.

*) I'll make a point to ramble about the beer burp sometime, but for now, suffice to say that in this case, they bordered on retching. My stomach rebelled and my burps tasted like old beer and nail polish.

I smelled very little hops, and certainly none of the promised citrus and resin. In fact, I mostly smelled Leffe.
Plain old ubiquitous Leffe.
Take any of the dozen-or-so different Leffes and smell it.
That's what this Leffe smells like.
A signature smell of faux bananas and solvent, mixed with corn syrup, and the pervasive stench of an industrial brewing site. Where the Whitbread Goldings was supposed to be , I cannot tell, but my guess is it was hiding.

I wish I could say I wasn't expecting this, but then I'd be lying.

Onward, dauntless zythophiles, to another brave horizon! Here comes Leffe Royale Cascade IPA:

Because IPA is always served in an Abbeye chalice.
According to the blurb (*), dryhopping with Cascade magically transformed the Royale into an IPA.

*) I swear I'll get back to you on the blurb and it won't be much longer now.

I'll be the first to make disparaging comments about the narrowness and restrictions of beer styles, but let me make this very clear once and for all: dry-hopping alone doth not an IPA make. A beer doesn't "become" an IPA simply by infusing it with hops. Thinking of IPA as merely "a beer with increased hop rates" detracts not only from IPA, but in fact from all beers with any hops in them at all.

Belgium's got its head so far up its own beerbellied navel that all we seem to understand about IPAs is "that special technique" called dry-hopping. Infuse any beer with a smidge of hops and tadaaaah! It's an IPA!
TADAAAAH  =  KA-CHING!
Granted, Cascade IPA does smell a bit of hops, and is infinitely more hop-forward than the Whitbread Golding (which I assume is just plain Leffe Royale, packaged differently).
And sure enough, that little hoppy note tries its best to hide and obfuscate the lingering presence of the Royale base, but in the end, it is just that: a Leffe Royale, briefly exposed to a minimal amount of hops.
It is to Leffe what the Tripel Hop is to Duvel, only even less subtly executed. Underneath the Cascade, you still get that signature Leffe taste, of yeasty solvents and rushed beer, and the burps that follow are, alas, once again devoid of hops.

There are certainties in life.
Death & taxes. Even for Lemmy.
Leffe.

Both beers were exactly what I feared they would be: half-assed attempts to capitalise on the current trend toward hoppy craft beer. A thinly veiled marketeer's ploy to imbue into the Leffe brand an image of innovation which it sorely lacks, and which it is, in fact, utterly incompatible with.

Just look at the blurb (*) and tell me I exaggerate.



Interludium : the blurb



A short story about a legendary beer
For a master brewer, nothing is more precious than hops. Because the hops determine all of the beer's properties: the character, the flavour and the colour. The selection of hops is the basis of everything and has to be done with extensive knowledge and accuracy. When master brewer Charles Nowen developed the Leffe Royal range, his ambitions were clear: to develop exceptional and characterful beer styles which are both unique and special. After searching the whole world for the best hop growers, he finally chose three hop varieties. One of these is Cascade. A prestigious hops, grown in the Cascade mountains in the USA.
...the process of dry hopping makes this golden-blond beer a true IPA (an "India Pale Ale" is a beer with increased hop rates) for conoisseurs...
Experts' advice
This blond beer, the result of a unique brewing process, has the flavour of a real IPA beer, so much appreciated by connoisseurs. Its lively disposition, refreshing character and citrus accents (lemon, yellow grapefruit) are courtesy of Charles Nouwen, Leffe's master brewer, who has travelled the world in search of the best hops. Eventually, he chose three varieties, one of them being Cascade IPA. A hop variety bred in the Cascade Mountains in the United States.

Translated faithfully from the brewery's website by yours truly at the time of writing, this bit of proza highlights just about every illness and ailment of current-day macro brew labeling.
Between the self-anointment and the pompous ego-trippery, you'll find inconsistencies and errors rubbing shoulders with dubious claims.
I could spend pages and pages picking apart those handful of lines, but let me keep things short:

  • I can understand how names like Eyjafjallajökull can be problematic, but a brewery so proud of its master brewer should at least make an effort to spell his name correctly. Failing that, constistency of errors is still preferrable to nominative ad-libbing. If you've got money to send your master brewer globetrotting, you've got money for a blurbsmith with editing skills.
  • Hops do not determine all of the beer's properties. If they did, we wouldn't be so fussy about malts and yeast and even water. Of all beer's properties affected by hops, colour is a singularly bad example since it simply is not. Not even a little. But people are stupid so they'll swallow this nonsense too.
  • We got it the first time round. No need to reiterate the first paragraph word by word in the second, in hopes we'll find the "experts's advice" more valuable. Besides, who are these experts anyway?
  • Charles travelled the whole wide world in search of the best hops, and all he could come up with was fucking Cascade? Which for some reason is named  Cascade IPA by "the experts"? 
  • Worst of all perhaps: don't tell us that your "unique" beer tastes "like a real IPA". Because it doesn't, and even if it did, it'd be the least useful thing to say about it.
This blurb is a typical example of macro breweries' approach to labeling and marketing: a loud and trumpeting raspberry being blown at the customers, at truth, humility and at common sense.

Here's what that blurb needs in order to become so much more accurate and useful:

<sarcasm> 
A short story about a legendary beer
For a master brewer, nothing is more precious than hops. Because the hops determine all of the beer's properties: the character, the flavour and the colour. The selection of hops is the basis of everything and has to be done with extensive knowledge and accuracy. When master brewer Charles Nowen developed the Leffe Royal range, his ambitions were clear: to develop exceptional and charachterful beer styles which are both unique and special. After searching the whole world for the best hop growers, he finally chose three hop varieties. One of these is Cascade. A prestigious hops, grown in the Cascade mountains in the USA.
Experts' advice
This blond beer, the result of a unique brewing process, has the flavour of a real IPA beer, so much appreciated by connoisseurs. Its lively disposition, refreshing character and citrus accents (lemon, yellow grapefruit) are courtesy of Charles Nouwen, Leffe's master brewer, who has travelled the world in search of the best hops. Eventually, he chose three varieties, one of them being Cascade IPA. A hop variety bred in the Cascade Mountains in the United States.
</sarcasm> 
I know: I shouldn't poke fun at whatever tripe is being served on the packaging and the brewer's website. I know that, at the end of the day, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

...but it becomes an irresistible joke-butt at some point.



Interludium : done


*) told you I would get to the blurb eventually

That whole "For Science!" thing? It will be the death of me one day, unless I learn to curb(*) my curiosity and leave those obvious macro-Frankenbrews nicely on the shelves where they can be pretty and vacuous like the auto-tuned pop starlets they are.

*) Gag, chain, sedate or otherwise restrain. Seriously, my cats have got nothing on me in the face of curiosity-with-possible-consequences.

I make a solemn vow today. I will one day expose myself (and possibly a few of my more masochistically inclined friends) to these beers in a (fair) blind trial. And if even one of them takes anything but an instant dislike to them, I promise I'll do a side-by-side comparison of all and every Leffe brew commercially available at the time, and write about them all without a single disparaging comment.

Until then,

Greetz,

Jo

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