Peruvian Gold

Yes, that’s one of them craft jam jars

Here is an IPA, an India Pale Ale. Hazy, orange-yellow in colour, flurries of tropical fruit (ripe fruits sitting in a bowl in a sunny kitchen, on a pine table) emerging from the glass like the furies of Greek myths, benevolent though, beneficial even, bending one’s thoughts towards taking a sip or maybe a complete submergence in the beer. Petrol, as in Riesling, tropical fruit, that ripeness again, that sun-stroked ripeness, and then a dry rasping finish that lingers like the memory of a long lost love affair. That savoury allium note of a West Coast IPA (the Pacific rather than the Cornish Riviera), the tropical fruit sweetness and pungency and sensuality, the dry graininess of a malt backbone, the charkas of grain, and that dry finish all combine, a combination once forbidden and now bidden to all, and create an assertive and expressive IPA, the dominion of lupulin. And outside in the sun, the foothills of the Andes rise, steep and sudden. This is IPA country but it also the Sacred Valley of the Incas, and I have been drinking Inti Punku IPA from Cervecería del ValleSagrado and immersing myself in it with the rhapsodic and revelatory nature of a traveller who’s found themselves in a new land and discovered a small slice of home.