Small Pale

Tried a new beer at the weekend (see above) it's by Manchester maestros Cloudwater and is called "Small Pale" and its a revelation. 

Traditional wisdom is that to get bigger flavour and mouthfeel in a beer you need to create more alcohol in it by using bigger charges of fermentables (like barley) and possibly even ramping up the sugar by adding maltose or candy sugar so that the yeast has more food to convert into alcohol; we all know that the weaker the beer the more "watery" it tends to taste. Of course in days gone by low strength beer has been a perfectly respectable drink, back when workers liked to down a few pints at lunchtime and return for the afternoon shift in reasonable shape they tended toward the traditional session bitters at around 3-4% ABV but since the influx of continental lagers and more recently flavorsome American IPA styles, the ABV of beer has been steadily creeping upward. It's not unusual for a modern craft beer bar to not have anything on tap under 5% and sometimes even higher, the emphasis these days is most definitely on variety and the taste experience (half pint by half pint) and not getting blotto by drinking 8 pints of 6% lager on a Friday night.

Enter Cloudwater, who have a stellar reputation for BIG flavour double IPA style beers usually coming in at around 6-8%. This time they've created a low alcohol version of this big taste profile at a miserly 2.9% ABV. I wasn't expecting much from this beer but boy was I wrong! Blindfold I would have sworn blind that this was a 5-6% American IPA style beer, and a good one at that! Plenty of body and wonderful fruity/citrus flavours in a modern hazy, perfectly carbonated package, a brilliant beer and the best bit is you can session it with ease and not feel like you've slept in a tumble dryer the next morning, good effort Cloudwater!