Wednesday beer — Duration Doses, 5.1%

What does this beer from Duration do to me when I drink it, apart from making me dramatise my inner feelings about the superbness of Noble hops and the refreshment and pinprick of joy that superlatively lagered beers bring to my soul as it turns its furrowed brow towards the gentleness of southern climes? Every gulp of this German Pils, made and laid to rest but not forever in the middle of the Norfolk countryside, carries a nod to my imagination. It makes me think about long forgotten debates in long-forgotten monasteries about the weight of a feather against that of a soul; it makes me think of the spirits that guard wells and pools and small rivers and whose presence on the earth is a whisper compared to the roar of the Severn Bore; it makes me think of the glimpse some have had of a forgotten land whose folk speak an unknown language but who are there between us and the land in which they live; it is a beer of magic and tall tales and old lives and yet as modern as the glimmer of chrome in a gleaming bar and as relevant as the sun that comes out each day to shine. 

Yes, it is a pale golden sheen in colour, and has a fresh floral note on the nose, which is almost mineral-like in its freshness, enticing and enchanting, as if you’ve caught a glimpse of something beautiful reflected in a pool and yearn and cry because you know you cannot really experience it. That mineral-like and floral note of the hop character extends itself onto the palate alongside a light, lemon-sweet presence and a bracingly dry finish with echoes of bitterness that hang around like the gruff voice of a god who has suddenly taken its leave. This is a heavenly beer with an angelic presence on the tongue, even with the soft growl of bitterness in the finish — it is not an ethereal beer, a beer of the fae folk, more like a beer that reminds me of the growing sound of approaching thunder that never seems to break, but remains comfortingly and cosily somewhere beyond the mountains that you know you will go to one day and perhaps never return from. That is what this wonderful beer says to me. 

You might or might not be able to get this beer online at the moment as it is out of stock on the brewery’s website, but I can guarantee it will be worth waiting for when we can walk out in the sun without fear again. This btw is going to be my regular Wednesday beer, something which I have just drunk or something that I once drunk and made me think about it in a way that many beers don’t.