One of the joys of being a home-brewer is that you get unexpected surprises every now and then. I gave a work colleague a bottle of my oatmeal coffee porter and he turned up with a selection of beers for me in return…all of them purchased at the Windsor Eton Brewery shop – one of which was this rather excellent West Coast style IPA…

I do like a big beer in a smaller bottle, and for a lovely big IPA, 330ml is pretty much where I want it to be at.

Treason pours a lovely IPA orange colour – just like all good exemplars of the style. There’s a very slight haze – which I hoped was from loads of dry-hopping (it’s also a bottle-conditioned beer too…which is always nice.) The head was lacy-white and quite long-lasting…

The nose was all sweet malt and tropical hops, with no obvious pineyness or resin – just big old juicy fruity hops…that’s the West Coast way; and as I’ve also mentioned once or twice before when reviewing beers and formulating recipes, it’s a hopping strategy that’s so very now.

The carbonation is excellent and first impressions are of a whopping great solid mouthful of beer.

The resinous, tropical and piney hops team up to shoulder-charge your taste-buds and, after they’ve finished giving you a right old seeing to, a gorgeous creamy mouth-feel floods in (a little wheat in the grist, I wonder?)

At the swallow an excellent mouth-watering bitterness prickles and suffuses you with more pines and fruit that makes for a very lasting and satisfying finish.

This is a bloody marvellous IPA and I like it a lot; if I was to be unnecessarily picky, maybe I’d like a little more amplitude on the tropical notes in the taste, but in reality that is such a minor quibble it’s barely worth noting…I’d drink this every day with no trouble at all.

…and I do like that bottle artwork.  A lot.

http://www.uprisingbrewery.co.uk/

Well done, Uprising!