Patreon’s Choice: De Molen Not For Sale Ale — Craft Lager

We asked our Patreon subscribers to suggest some beers for us to taste and Chris Gooch chose this one: “I’m dying to know what the De Molen Not for Sale Ale is like. An initiative that deserves a lot of support.”

The initiative he mentions started in Sweden and is dedicated to tackling human trafficking and modern slavery. One hundred per cent of the profits from this beer, brewed in the Netherlands, go to the Not for Sale campaign. We bought our bottles from Honest Brew at a quite reasonable £2.89 per 330ml, plus delivery.

It’s a hazy yellow beer with high carbonation. The aroma is a back-and-forth of straightforward citrus hop and pungent, funky, overripe fruit. There’s perhaps a bit of vegetable or leafy herb in there, too.

It tastes of green apple, orange pith and brown bread, before seguing into the kind of bitterness that hangs around, feeding back on itself until there’s no bandwidth left.

We liked it a lot, with only some very slight nitpicking reservations about those vegetal notes. It’s bright, full of flavour and character, and quite distinctive. If we had to compare it to another beer it would be the single-hop Cascade ale brewed by Castle Rock for M&S a few years ago (and, what do you know, De Molen does use Cascade in this beer) except it’s quirkier and dirtier, in the best possible sense.

Is it a lager? In technical terms, no. It’s even less like lager than our experiments in brewing Helles with Goldings and Maris Otter — more fruity and funky, in fact, than many packaged and pacified British ales. But in terms of how you might use it? Yes, it fits in the lager slot. It tastes great cold, bites at the back of the throat, doesn’t demand your full attention, and tastes primarily of malt and hops. And, at 4.7% ABV, you could probably tackle a few in a row if you had the taste.

We’d definitely buy this again even if 100 per cent of the profits were going into somebody’s pocket. It’s our kind of beer.