Partizan, Orange IPA

I had in mind to write some sort of invective against modern, bottle conditioned beers, being upset as I was with the fact that unless you love yeast, there is rarely 330ml of drinkable liquid in a 330ml bottle of bottle conditioned beer. I mean, look at that photo! Carefully pouring this orange IPA from Partizan gave me just under half a pint (marked on the glass) of non-yeasty beer. That's 280ml (ish). My maths isn't great (B at GCSE which was a bloody miracle) but a quick sum seems to make that just over 16% of the bottle remaining unpoured. If I pay £2.50 from Mr Lawrence for the bottle, which I did (a decent price for a 7.4% abv IPA to be fair), then that's 40p of non drinkable liquid in the bottle. (Approx.) Times that by the number of bottle conditioned ales I'll drink in a year and it might come to a fair few quid....

I like good beer though. So, in light of the recent, controversial Fool's Gold article (possibly aimed at ltd ed. beers only), I think I'll prefer to leave the indignation to others and get on with the yeast as best I can.

This was a lovely IPA from Partizan, brewed with some bit fruity new world hops which gave it a wonderful and huge fresh orange kick off the nose and a wallop of Fanta in the gob, with a lovely, long and satisfying bitter finish. Bit thin perhaps, but that's the style to be appreciated rather than a nit to be picked. But there was a huge amount of sediment! I thought for a moment that it might have contained orange bits, like a Tropicana, the flakes were that large. I bought a fair few bottles of this at the time (6 I think, a few as gifts) and on one of my less careful pours, I simply couldn't avoid including some yeast which really tainted the taste for me.

I understand this beer was brewed as part of the Rainbow Project, an initiative asking 7 big UK breweries to contribute a rainbow coloured beer. I would've loved to try this Partizan out of a keg - no yeast issues would've made all the difference for me I think.