If you’re in Belfast and you’re interested in craft beer, you’re probably familiar with Farmageddon. If you’re reading this from further afield, Farmageddon are based on a farm in Comber, roughly 10 miles outside Belfast; for the last five years, they’ve been brewing a range of unfiltered, unpasteurised, vegan friendly beers. Coming from a background in homebrewing with a passion for punk rock, their ethos stems from that – self-sufficiency, sustainability and minimizing waste – even the spent grain from the beer making process feeds the pigs on their farm.
Their first venture into canning arrived in the form of their New England IPA. It also came with a re-envisioning of their logo and a new lease of life for their branding. We’ve always loved the Farmageddon name and logo but the bottle labels have never been eye-catching. In a world of craft beer where designers such as James Yeo and Nanna Guldbæk are making stunning beer can artwork, it can be hard to compete for smaller breweries. The new Farmageddon cans are a welcome refresh – and hopefully a sign of things to come.
So we were excited to see the new Farmageddon cans, and even moreso when we realised the new beer was a NEIPA. It’s the style of the moment so when your motto is “It may be cloudy, harden up”, it’s either a match made in heaven, or you’ll have a helluva time explaining what went wrong.
Farmageddon needn’t worry, this is right up there with the best. It’s different though… the aroma is all apricot and peach, the flavour, a bold tropical mixture of peach, apricot and mango. They’ve used Sorachi Ace which is a bit leftfield for a NEIPA and you can really taste it sneaking through on the back end, giving this beer a striking lemon bitterness on the finish.
It still has that signature Farmageddon taste though – there are few breweries we’d say have a distinct flavour – and we’re not sure if it’s an ingredient or part of the brewing process, but there’s something distinctly ‘BrewDog’ about BrewDog beers, for example. Farmageddon beers have a similar quality – whether it’s intentional or incidental, there’s something uniquely ‘Farmageddon’ about their beers. Whatever it is, it works for us. It makes their beers recognisable from taste alone, which is pretty impressive in a world where beer geeks (like us) seldom buy the same beer twice.
Having said that, we’ve had a can of this every time we’ve seen it over the last few weeks in Belfast – in the Sunflower, in the Black Box and we picked up a few from the Vineyard too. That should tell you everything you need to know – it’s our favourite local beer to-date.
Rumour is the BrewDog flavour comes from their use of simcoe in most of their beers though that was something I heard quite a long time ago. Could be true though!