There’s something to be said for sticking to what you’re good at and not being swayed by trying to follow trends. Not doing something just because everyone else is.

White Rabbit is a case in point.

For yonks the brewery has just had two beers in their stable (warren?) – the White Ale and the Dark Ale. They didn’t pissfart around – they did exactly what it says on the box. And they served as great entry-level beers – I’ve had the Dark Ale on tap a few times since and, damn, it’s still a fine beer.

These beers weren’t complicated. They were simple but put together very well – and that sort of thing is really under-rated in the beer world a lot of the time. See, in the world of good beer, it’s the weird stuff that gets the attention, that cuts across all the noise. So brewers will chuck in artichokes, sunflower seeds, building rubble or anything else likely to make geeks go ‘‘they made a beer with chunks of brick in it? I’ve got to try that’’.

Or they cram as many hops as they can into a beer so that your taste buds don’t work for the next three days.

With their latest beer – the Belgian style pale ale – I feel White Rabbit has tried to join the Weirdo Races rather than playing it straight. Because their third member of the family is, well, a bit of a mess. It doesn’t commit to being Belgian or a pale ale; in fact it’s as though it’s feeling totally confused about what it’s supposed to be.  The result is a jarring combination of Belgian characters and pale ale characters that never meld together.

I’d have preferred if they made a straightforward pale. Or a straightforward Belgian ale. Because this Belgian pale is very much the black sheep of the White Rabbit family.

I’ll still drink their Dark Ale, but I’ll give this a miss.