Brewery: Innis & Gunn
Location: Edinburgh, Scotland
ABV: 7.7%
Version: Bottled
Source: Sainsbury’s

Innis & Gunn’s various oak-aged, cask-matured ales seem to be real marmite beers. Some folks love ‘em (I was out for a few beers with a Scottish chap a couple of weeks ago who’s a big fan) and some folks seem to hate ‘em (I’ve seen some pretty scathing mentions on other blogs from time to time). I was suitably impressed when I first tried the Original and Blonde variants and have since sampled and enjoyed both the Canadian Cask and Rum Cask versions, so I’m definitely a fan. Which is why I happily grabbed the Innis & Gunn box set when I saw it on the shelf in Sainsbury’s back before Xmas.

The pack (which at the time was priced at a very reasonable £8 and was included in the Xmas gift 3-for-2 deal to-boot) contained an Innis & Gunn branded stem/snifter glass (I’m not 100% sure what the technical term is, but it looks like this and in his blog piece Mr Mackney describes it as a ‘tulip’ glass, which is good enough for me) as well as three of their ales: an Original, a Rum Cask and a new one on me: an Innis & Gunn IPA, weighing in at a respectable 7.7% ABV.

Pouring a pale, golden caramel colour with a thin head, Innis & Gunn IPA was packed full of slightly sweet, toasty, vanilla-tinged biscuity flavours, with a faint smoky-wood note, presumably from the oak ageing process, which made it similar to the Innis & Gunn Blonde and Original variants. It compared well to a few other UK IPA-style strong-ish beers that I’ve had, such as Marston’s Old Empire or Dark Star Six Hop. But what it seemed to be missing was the sharp dryness of a big-hop finish that we’ve come to expect from big-ABV IPAs courtesy of most of the top American independents, and it’s not in the same league as UK brews like Thornbridge Jaipur, BrewDog Punk IPA (or Hardcore IPA, or Chaos Theory, or Atlantic), Worthington White Shield or Marble Dobber, Hopdaemon Skrimshander et. al. So does this mean I’ll be off on another “fake IPA!” rant (as per my previous post?)

Well, no. Because as Pete Brown tells us in Hops and Glory and Martyn Cornell mentions in Amber, Gold & Black, the ale that arrived in India used to be very different to the one that left Burton (or, indeed, London, Edinburgh and several other brewing towns). Over the course of a few months at sea, in almost constant motion on board a pitching, rolling East Indiaman, moving through a number of different climate zones and changing temperature along the way, the brew in the barrel would undergo an almost alchemical transformation equivalent to at least a couple of years of cellar ageing. As a result, the over-hopped bitterness of the young brew (Martyn Cornell tells us that most breweries used double the regular volume of hops in their IPAs) would all-but disappear and the other flavours and strength of the ale would shine through.

So whilst Innis & Gunn’s latest IPA (the info on their website refers to the 2006 bottling, which was a lower strength 6.4% ABV) probably isn’t quite the authentic, finished article, the 55-day maturation that Innis & Gunn IPA undergoes in (presumably static) oak casks means it’s a step in the right direction. The sweetness and biscuity-vanilla flavour of the beer would presumably mellow and deepen if they left the stuff in-barrel for another 55 days or so and maybe, you know, sloshed it around a bit? I’d be interested to see what one of these tasted like after a couple of years, although as the beer isn’t bottle-conditioned (clear glass, can’t have all that sediment lurking at the bottom…) maybe the character of it wouldn’t change all that much after all?

Incidentally, the Sunday Times ran a feature in their business section the other week: How I Made It: Dougal Sharp, founder of Innis & Gunn. Interesting bit of background on the founding of the company and the origins of the I&G brew.