Life

Craft Beer: A couple of Rascals and Bullhouse's Small Axe

Big Red DIPA is a hefty upgrade on Rascal's Big Hop Red
Big Red DIPA is a hefty upgrade on Rascal's Big Hop Red Big Red DIPA is a hefty upgrade on Rascal's Big Hop Red

I THINK I’ll always have a soft spot for Rascals beers. When I wanted to toast Manchester United’s FA Cup triumph last year, I reached for a can of their Big Hop Red – it seemed appropriate.

Rascals are a brewery who appear to value image and design quite highly, as their cool cans and tag line of ‘are your cheeky enough?’ illustrate but, especially in the case of their After Eight-style mint chocolate porter, there’s a fair bit of substance behind that style.

So, I thought I’d road test another couple of their beers this week. At a time when Irish brewers are knocking out double IPAs as quickly as Paul Pogba changes his hairstyle, Rascals have got in on the act with Big Red DIPA. It’s a hefty upgrade on the Big Hop Red and you feel every inch of the 8.5 per cent they’ve crammed in there. Coming in 330ml cans, once poured it feels heavy in the glass too.

The beer is a deep cherrywood colour and there’s a slight grapefruit aroma carrying through into the taste. But this is quite a malt-forward beer. There’s a sweet, biscuity toffee flavour – think Toffee Pops with a fruity twang.

Wunderbar IPA is slightly lower in abv, at 6 per cent, but still packs a punch. It's billed a German IPA, due to the German hops and Munich malt they’ve used. Pouring a browny, red colour, there is a sweet malty taste, but the peachy aroma gives a hint to the predominant flavour. It’s wonderfully tropical tasting IPA with mango and juicy pineapple notes and the bitterness isn’t too sharp. For all the strength of it, it’s quite smooth and drinkable.

BULLHOUSE, the breakout brewery of 2016, are promising some new brews for 2017 but firstly they’ve launched a repackaged version of their Small Axe IPA. They’ve tweaked the recipe a bit, chucking in Citra, Chinook and Simcoe hops and adding Casacde to those three for the dry hopping.

Small Axe is now available in cans too, ensure those juicy, hoppy flavours are as fresh as possible. The can design, by illustrator Andy Hamilton, is also eye-catching too so look out for the bull.