Children of Darkness is the beer that made a big difference to the fortunes of HopDog. It was made for last year’s Great Australasian Beer Spectapular after brewer Tim Thomas got a late invite after a brewer in New Zealand had to pull out due to the Christchurch earthquake.

So he cranked out this black IPA and watched as it became one of the most popular beers with the punters at GABS and later, when it went into bottles, became a big seller for the little brewery. So much so that he tried to stop making it several times, only to have to keep brewing CoD when the public demanded it (the latest bottling run will be the last for a while, unless there’s another beer geek outcry).

The beer really established HopDog’s name in places like the beer Mecca of Melbourne and had geeks in that city thinking about a visit to Nowra to see the brewery first-hand. CoD even found it’s way into the Local Taphouse Hottest 100 – a sure sign of its popularity.

But it didn’t float my boat when I tried it on the Illawarra Brewery bar’s swinging taps just after GABS. I put it down to my preference for what a black IPA should be. See, I like a black IPA to take the dark colour of a stout or porter but not any of the roasts notes. All I want in the flavour is IPA-ness. In fact, after trying the Children of Darkness back then I decided to make a homebrewed black IPA.

I hadn’t tried the Children of Darkness since then but Tim gave me a few bottles to see if my opinion had changed. And the answer is: somewhat. I like the piney aroma the beer gives off, as well as the roasts notes that undercut it. Then there’s the pleasant IPA piney flavour, which I enjoyed until the roasts, coffee notes came in. While those flavours were less overt than I remembered, I still kind of wished they weren’t there.

Which means some will call my taste in beer into question when I say that Children of Darkness still doesn’t float my boat. There are lots and lots of people who are huge fans of this beer, but I’m not one of them. I really like a lot of HopDog beers (including the one appearing on Saturday) but this isn’t one of them.

Though that clearly hasn’t hurt sales of Children of Darkness one iota.