A Golden Goose?

Those of you who have already got a taste for craft beer will more than likely have already tasted our drop for this instalment of IPA Monster. Goose Island is one of those happy few IPAs to make it to the shelves of the evil empire of our bigger supermarkets. It might be outsold ten to one by your standard lagers, but hey, it's a start.



Perhaps part of the wide appeal of Goose Island is that it is not ridiculously strong or crazy tasting. This is an ideal gateway drug for the IPA virgin in fact, and a beer that I often recommend to pals who are not IPA converts… yet. That said, it has absolutely bags of taste and hits all the right buttons that a decent India Pale Ale should. Slightly confusingly the bottle says "English Style IPA" - but I would liken it more to a new world type IPA because it's nothing like those trad IPAs you find in English pubs.

Straight from the off, this beer has a punchy nose; you could get slightly intoxicated on the smell alone. On the tongue it's totally beguiling: loads of fruity flavour mingling in the middle and quite complex. The description on the old bottle said lychee, which sounds pretentious but is actually quite accurate. Lots of lovely maltiness and a bit of vanilla in the mix too, before you get that hit of dry, piny bitterness at the end.

If you take any one element in isolation- the tropical fruit in the middle and the intensely bitter finish, it sounds like it almost shouldn't work. But the genius of this beer is its superb balance, which rounds off any rough edges while maintaining a moreish complexity. This is often the mark of a great IPA: a beer this easy to drink has no right to be just a fraction under 6% proof. I could happily slay a small flock of these particular geese.

RATING: 9/10
IPA MONSTER SUMMARY: A superbly balanced beer, tantalisingly fruity, dry and deliciously malty.