Trouble Brewing Sabotage IPA

Brewed by Trouble Brewing
Style: India Pale Ale (IPA)
Allenwood, Co. Kildare, Ireland

Serve in Shaker, Tulip

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Deep amber with a thin head. Aroma and flavour is dough and dust. Slight hop notes in the background but lacks a bit of bite.

On tap at the irish fest village. Orange colour. Fruity taste. Well balanced bitterness. Overall an ok ipa but not really impressed

On tap. Appearance: ruby red, medium off white head. Aroma: Malty with quite the grassy hop aroma, sweet with lemon rind. Flavour: Malty, sweet leading into a hoppy bitterness, had a nice mouthfeel with a lingering bitterness. Reminds me of the first version of Mad Tom IPA.

On tap in The Brew Dock. Amber pour with a frothy white head. Aroma: subdued aromas of hops, toffee, pine, citrus and grapefruit. Slightly tinny. Taste/mouthfeel. Refreshing and slightly dry. There is hoppy bitterness there and the grapefruit, citrus etc come through but subdued. It’s good to see a decent Irish IPA, however they can be better than this.

Draught at the Bierhaus. Pours a deep amber with a thick white head. Looks appetizing. Pretty banale aromas of grass and hay. Equally plain sweet and slightly bitter tastes of grass, hay and malt. Light malty aftertaste, virtually no hop finish, bizarrely for a so-called IPA. Light carbonation amd a medium to light body. Hugely disappointing effort from a normally terrific brewery. Very grassy and really lacks any bite or bitterness. Would like to try cask, just to see if there’s any improvement but otherwise it’s just disappointingly dull.

Cask conditioned at the launch night in Against the Grain, Dublin. Deep hazy amber/orange with a nice off-white head. Aroma gives touches of pine resin and grapefruit as well as a big dollop of sweet malt; a soapy/fairy liquid scent in there too. Taste, unfortunately, gives a big soapy hit more than anything else. There’s pine, pithy citrus and orange in there too, but it all rather gets swallowed up by the sweetness of the malt and the off-putting soapiness. Hop character is very muddled. Sweet malt isn’t suited to my palate at all. Aftertaste initially is pretty tasty orange and pine resin, but two-thirds of way through the pint the soapy and sweet notes really kicked in. Had very high hopes for this (probably too high to be fair) so I was left feeling disappointed; Sabotage is just a bit messy really. Some marks for effort to the brewer (and a big thanks for putting on the launch), but the search for a decent Irish IPA continues.