Northern Beaches brewer Nomad is known for making unusual beers with Australian ingredients.
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For instance take their Freshie, it’s a gose style beer with seawater and pepper.
The seawater comes from one of those northern beaches while the pepper from Tasmania.
While the combination may sound weird, a gose (pronounced Go-Za) has actually been around for a while.
It’s an old German style of beer made with salt and coriander. Trust me, it’s better than it sounds.
Other ingredients that have found their way into Nomad beers have featured chillies, orange peel, cherries, shiraz grapes, wattleseed, finger limes and lemon myrtle.
But it’s not like all their beers are like this – they also have a core range that is a bit more straightforward.
The latest addition to that range – and the first Nomad beer in cans – is the Long Reef Pale Ale.
It comes in a silver can with a stick-on label – presumably because that’s a more cost-effective approach than having special cans made for each beer.
An identifiable characteristic of the Nomad core range is a strong bitterness. And the Long Reef fits in with that.
The bitterness is more than a lot of other pales on the market but is still very much within the pale ale parameters. This is not an IPA hiding out in the pale ale world.
There’s also some very noticeable tropical fruit aromas and flavours here that stand up and hold their own against the bitterness.
If you’ve not had any Nomad beers, this is as good a place as any to start.
Maybe you could work your way up to that gose.
Glen Humphries is the 2016 AIBA Australian Beer Writer of the Year.