Calypso
This Calypso beer is a "dry-hopped sour". I'm a little dodgy on sours as I often don't like them. Hopslist.com tells me that Calypso hops come from the Yakima Valley and are from the Hopsteiner lineage. They have an acidic flavour as well as fruitiness leaning towards apple, pear and peach, with a hint of citrus. Wow… sounds like a very complex hop to me. I'm sure I've had Calypso hops before though and not disliked them. So here goes…
On opening this 4% volume Calypso beer there was the familiar sour aroma I have recently been sampling from other sour beers. Not unpleasant, but definitely something I can pick up on now through experience. This light golden beer pours with an excitable frothy head. There is fruitiness in the aroma, and there is citrus and that sour acidity I've come to expect. Still the aroma of the beer made my mouth water a little.
On taste this refreshingly sour beer is bursting with flavour. There's the promised fruitiness mixed with the sour undertones, followed by a little sweetness from the malted barley, and then I was reminded into the aftertaste of the earthiness I've had in a previous beer that was heavy on the Calypso hops. I recognised it straight away, because that earthy flavour was so distinct the last time that I spent most of the beer trying to decide whether I liked it or not. By the time I figured I liked that oddly earthy finish, the beer had gone. This time, I got to savour it from the start!
Soundwave IPA
I must say that the stunning artwork on both cans caught my eye when I picked them up in the store a few months back. The beautiful woman with the purple feathered hair on this Soundwave IPA is my favourite of the two. There is a certain mystery to this India Pale Ale. There is also a free grace of dance and life and light to it that especially brings about a great deal of emotion at this moment. Many of us are living in a locked down world where fear of an unseen airborne virus means we are confined to our own homes. It makes me want to fly away to a mystical land somewhere were we can be safe to roam.
This Soundwave is 5.6% in volume and the can welcomes you to a "tropical hop heaven". Ah, so that's where the feathered haired lady flies away to. I'll open the can and try to spirit myself there. There are tropical citrus and floral notes to the hops that burst forth on opening the can. This misty straw coloured IPA certainly spirited me away to a deserted island somewhere with sweet malts and refreshing bitter hoppy beer on tap. The tropical fruity and floral bitterness and subtle citrus undertones from the hops mixed perfectly with the sweetness from the pale malts into the aftertaste. There I was with the sun beating down on the beach as I lay listening to the ocean washing against the shore whilst watching a beautiful feathered haired lady fly by.
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