Grapefruit DDH Pale Ale in the Sunshine

The sun beats down on a village in the North East of England. Late May, and Summer is looming. Soon the shopping precinct will show the first signs of the change in the season, the advent of shirtless radgies strolling around at some level of intoxication, a can of Monster in one hand and their nads in the other. 

Soon we will all emerge goblin-like from our caves and blind God himself with our paleness under the sun.

A can of Brew By Numbers' "42" Grapefruit DDH Pale Ale sits before me on my scruffy, beaten up old garden table, in my scruffy and  beaten up old garden. In a moment it is open, pouring opaque sunshine gold into a glass with a little too much intensity from the hand of this reporter as he returns to the beer game after some years of silence.

The head is foamy and boisterous from my unskilled pour, a better man would have delivered a razor sharp perfect head for the photograph. A better man wouldn't have been put off by the wasp and several flies that immediately appeared on opening the can either.

The flies and wasp don't smell of anything that this reporter can deduce but the scent from the open can is of massive fresh grapefruit. Perhaps a continental version of this reporter, who lives somewhere with groves that aren't of the Byker variety, could easily deduce if it really does smell like grapefruit plucked straight from the tree, sliced open with an Opinel knife and squeezed into a glass. Here in the land of wheeltrim trees I can only surmise this. 

Either way, it's big, it's juicy,  and this is a good point to note that the beer is made with real grapefruits,  and then the wasp chases me into the house and when I sit down in the living room I see a fly has landed in the glass and has immediately died.

In scant moments, half of the beer is gone. Slightly sour, a little astringent, with bitterness that comes on strong but fades into sweetness after a few moments, this pale goes beyond "drinkable" into "chuggable". This reporter sets the glass down and calms his thirst, having only eaten a couple of slices of toast so far today. 

Beneath the grapefruit, which is here in spades, in groves if you will, the hops murmur more complex tropical notes. Stone fruit flavours and extra layers of citrus run down to the bottom of the glass as the beer shifts from one vessel to the other. 

Grapefruit pale ales feel like summer to this reporter, memories from the other side of forty return in drunken fragments, totaled in a beer garden somewhere by cans of Magic Rock's High Wire Grapefruit. Necking the same cans on a train to somewhere else, sunshine and life zipping past.

It's almost instinctive for me to assume a double dry hopped beer is going to be strong. Maybe it's a bias learned from drinking ludicrous double IPAs of similar opacity, so it is a relief to see that this is just ("just") 5.5% abv. One man's session beer is another man's rocket fuel, but to this pale goblin Brew By Numbers' "42" is drinkable in multitudes, a six-pack of this, not that supermarket craft beer of this ilk is sold in turtle-killers, would disappear without a trace in a sunny garden on one of those days when you convince yourself that the heat means you sweat the alcohol out and  so you physically can't get pissed.

It doesn't even taste its abv, blindfolded your correspondent would not have put this anywhere above 4%. Trouble brewing, or fun fermenting? Definitely the second option (drink responsibly and don't be a knob).

The aftertaste lingers sweet and just a little bitter, sticking around a while and fading slowly enough to make you really want another can.

And then it's gone, and I'm back to beer writing after years of shutting up about beer and getting on with day jobs. 

I'm restarting this blog and it's going to be published on a strict (ish) four week schedule. Week one is going to be a review of a craft beer available in supermarkets, week two is going to be something fresh from the pumps or the taps, which involves me leaving the goblin cave. Week three will be a craft beer available at specialist bottle shops. The fourth week will be a sort of wild card, when I might do something stupid like getting ripped to the tits on alcoholic energy drinks or maybe something less stupid like writing about whisk(e)y, depends on which direction the spirit moves me.

If you've enjoyed this article, I would love it if you would consider heading to my Ko-Fi page and tipping your writer.  A tip of just three quid will usually write off the price of the beer I've just written about, and any more will help me keep this content coming.

It's good to be back. It's not so good to have a wasp banging its head against the door to my porch. Cheers everyone.