Bottle from Sourced Market St Pancras and drunk at home. Hazy deep amber colour lasting white head. Earthy sherbert hoppy aroma. Quite an exciting aroma. It’s light sherberty and earthy in the mouth too. It’s quite a delicate sherberty fairy dust beer. It’s a bit like a girl in her late teens in a fairy costume dancing on tiptoes. Except the earthiness keeps reminding you that she’s also a woman and not a princess. Not sure what any of this means. Other than the flavour and finish are really good. The sherberty mouthfeel is really quite entrancing. It’s an utterly drinkable and quite surprising IPA at the same time. Good though. If completely quirky.

Bottle at home in London - picked up at the brewery. Tonight I tried Partizan’s IPA Belma Liberty. To be honest, I’m not especially well acquainted with either of these hops. I’ve had liberty hops in beers before (Hackney Brewery and Brew By Numbers have both produced beers using the variety, for example) but beers employing belma are few and far between.

The most notable thing about this IPA is that it is very sweet. Far sweeter, in fact, than almost any Partizan IPA I can recall having. It’s fairly oily, there’s a bit of ripe orange and mango, and there’s an overarching sweetness and bready character. It lacks the somewhat dry, pithy citrus notes of so many IPAs from this brewery. At 6.8% ABV the body is full, and the beer has carbonated enough spread around some of the sugary aspect. What’s perhaps most interesting about this IPA is a spicy note that carries through the beer and lingers in the finish, which is part pine and part cinnamon. It is perhaps the most intriguing element of the beer.

Overall it’s very drinkable stuff. But the sweet, almost jammy and syrupy base sets this IPA apart from some of the cleaner IPAs out there these days. For what it is, though, I actually do enjoy it.

Bottle - Earthy, woody hops.  Cloudy orange with a decent white head.  Orange peel and pithy bitterness.  A bit too earthy all around.  636312