Today's
Beer
Name
– Triple C
Brewer
– Thwaites
Classification
– Blonde Ale
Strength
– 4.4% ABV
Verdict
- At A Glance
On
the eye
– Brooding orange amber. Eye-catching carbonation makes for the
only (microscopic) blot on this beer's copybook.
On
the nose
– Understated citrus hops. You might even say 'stealth' hops, given the true scale of what lies beneath...
On
the tongue
– Traffic-stopping, jaw-dropping citrus, yet not without some sense of restraint. Vivid, dynamic, and
utterly delicious.
On
the subject
– Thwaites have been an established part of the cosy beer landscape
in Britain for a good old while now, so this ultra-modern brew came
to me as the most welcome shock. The reality is that an 'internal
revolution' has been underway at the brewery for quite a while now,
making for a portfolio of beers which hints at something of a split
personality. Half their range is proudly traditional, whilst the
other half swaggers around like it couldn't give a monkey's about such
tedious things as 'heritage'. This beer is from the latter half of
that spilt personality, and I can reveal that the substance behind
that 'swagger' is nothing less than diamond hard.
On
the market
– Fairly strong national presence, with the likes of Morrison's stocking this and plenty more from Thwaites' borderline-schizophrenic
output.
On the whole – 9.5/10
Full
Review
Does
the following statement apply to you?
"Since
discovering the new wave of massively hopped beers, I find all my old
favourites boring."
If
your answer is 'Yes'
you
are by no means alone, as this sort of sentiment represents a growing
phenomenon in the beer loving world which, left unacknowledged, could
eventually pose a significant problem for the beer industry.
That
'problem' is essentially described as follows. Those of us who are brazen enough to consider ourselves
'clued up' about the contemporary beer scene will inevitably have sampled a number of the so-called
'hop bomb' beers which dominate the output of the modern 'craft beer' market – but many of us have subsequently found that going back to our established favourites after discovering these new beers can be an alarmingly unrewarding experience.
It's a fairly straightforward,
one-way-street type of a scenario. Once you've experienced a bottle
of Thornbridge's 'Jaipur',
going back to buying bottles of Badger's 'Golden Champion'
seems a fairly pointless endeavour.
Similarly, a glass of BrewDog's '5AMSaint' served straight from your own fridge reduces the enjoyment
of shop bought Marston's 'Pedigree' by around 73.6%. Roughly
speaking.
Of course I'm being ridiculously
unscientific here, but although my point may be crudely put – I'm
absolutely certain that the essential core of this argument is
dangerously near the knuckle. And it's an argument more and more
people are having to grudgingly admit.
The best 'contemporary craft' beers
make the best 'old classics' taste dull.
And that statement comes from a guy who
once said he'd happily die before saying anything remotely like it.
The truth which I've since had to
accept is now crystal clear to me. Once you've seen the world through the prism of cutting edge craft brewed beer, it's difficult to
imagine how you could ever look at it in any other way.
The comforting news, perhaps, is that
the beer world is so vast, complex and enduring that any permanent
shift is never going to be quite as straightforward as I'm making it
seem. It's very likely that those old favourites of ours will win
back a lot of the ground they might initially appear to have lost
forever. Like with many aspects of life, it's really just a matter of
letting new and exciting things have their moment, before they too
take their place in our established experience base and thereby become every bit as boring as every other thing we've grown used to.
But for those of you still caught in
the delicious glare of those 'new wave beer' headlights,
today's brew is likely to become a mainstay in your fridge for a good
old while.
In short, Triple C is everything
a 'hop head' could wish for.
Tellingly, the widely lauded Cascade
hop variety has been added at every stage of the brewing process
(which happens to be three times, giving us the 'Triple' and the 'C'). The result being that this beer engulfs you with repeated
swathes of vivid grapefruit, gooseberry, lime, orange peel and
Bramley apple, each of which is pitched just at that mesmerising
point at one extreme of the taste spectrum where any fruit sweetness inherent in the
citrus begins to cross the impossible line into an almost salty bitterness, leaving
your taste buds in a frenzied state of delicious bewilderment,
grasping desperately at explanations as to what might be causing this
glorious feeling to occur to them.
It's a massively rewarding first few
sips, and it only gets better.
I want to make something absolutely
clear though. This may be a hop-heavy brew, but it's certainly no
'bomb.'
'Hop bomb' is a widely used
expression for beers such as this, and it's a phrase I dislike
because it tends to imply that little of what happens to the drinker
was a specifically targeted experience brought about by those
who created the drink in the first place. Bombs,
after all, are among the messiest weapons humans ever conceived of
and their outcomes, once triggered, are fairly arbitrary. 'Bomb'
really says very little about the enormous levels of skill found in
most brewhouses these days.
If we absolutely must
use multiple-casualty-devices to describe the
experience of drinking a beer (snore) then Triple C has to be
far closer to a 'guided-missile' than
a mere explosive. It knows exactly where it's going,
and it hits that target with devastating accuracy each and every time.
So, having established that there is a distinctly modern, hop-lead feel to this beer, I should add that Triple C
has very little of that aforementioned new beer 'swagger'. Thwaites
have been careful to keep this brew's 'traditionalist' feet
sufficiently on the ground to appeal to that other (ever shrinking)
section of the beer loving community whose inhabitants steadfastly
refuse to be dazzled by the twinkly lights of 'so-called
progress.' The sense of balance hasn't been entirely flung out of the equation as can
happen with more aggressive beers of this kind – and just enough
savoury biscuit malt has been left in play to keep the old guard from
reaching for their torches and pitchforks.
On reflection, perhaps that's actually the best
thing about this monumentally likeable drink. It has been so
brilliantly conceived, so expertly brewed and so carefully brought to
market in these deceptively unassuming bottles – that I don't think
anyone who claims to like beer could possibly find any aspect of it
not to like.
In fact, I'm now feeling so emboldened by my own super-confident rhetoric, I hereby urge everyone of legal
age to go out immediately and buy one.
Trust me, there's no tastier way to work on your swagger.
6 comments:
Good to see you back on the beer, Mark.
I thought the Thwaites Indus IPA (which sadly has now disappeared from my local Morrison's) was a better and more hoppy beer than this.
But I'll give Triple C another try on the strength of your review.
Thanks, me old mucker - it's been far too long for far too many reasons!
(How nice to be following you on Twitter btw, I've been Twittering away for a while there now quite without knowing you were around. Though your website does make it pretty clear on reflection!)
Anyhow, I first tried the Indus moments after I'd finished my first glass of Triple C and found myself falling head over heels with just the first of them.
Your input, however, makes me think I should revisit the IPA with all haste...
I've only been on twatter for two weeks, so you haven't missed much ;-)
Unfortunately my local Morrisons seems to have delisted this too so I've been denied the chance to taste it again. They still have Adnams' Ghost Ship, though.
Ha!
Small mercies and all that!
But I wonder what's behind that very odd decision...?
This is a great posst
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