1) I’m in the sixth year of writing this blog. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking – “jeez, he’s been doing this since 2012 and he’s still rubbish at it”. To which I say, “Ha! Very clever of you”. But seriously, one of the problems with writing more than 1600 posts is that it’s hard to avoid repeating yourself. It’s hard to avoid repeating yourself (see what I did there? Yeah, okay, I’ll quit it).

2) But it’s true. Sometimes when bashing out a post on a regular release I might end up rehashing something I wrote last year and just hope there are no obsessive fans out there who remember everything I’ve written (it’s a pretty safe bet that are no such people). Take the Little Creatures Single Batch releases. Over the years I’ve had a few go-to tropes. One of them is talking about how awesome The Big Dipper was. Another was talking about those squat bottles the Single Batch beers used to come in.

3) Yeah, it’s based on lazyness. I’ve got a space to fill every Friday, so I have to crank out something. Besides, the Little Creatures PR team always send me free beer so I like to make sure I at least “pay” for it by writing a review – good or bad. Okay, so what I’ll do here is aim to close out this review without mentioning any of those tired go-to cliches. Shouldn’t be too hard given I’ve crapped on for three of the five points and so only have two left.

4) This is the Little Creatures’ version of an XPA. Usually that name just confuses me (“So, it’s really just a pale ale, right?”) here the name makes sense because it’s an amplified version of their legendary pale ale – they’ve taken the pale and added a little “extra”. Which means hops, according to the press release.

5) I’ll take a punt and assume they’ve boosted the malt bill as well, because it doesn’t taste like a beer that’s tipped too far toward the hop end of the equation – ie it’s still balanced. It’s a lovely, juicy beer with hits of mango and some bitterness that is there but not overpowering. If I’m being honest, I’d like to see them replace the pale ale with this – I’d sure buy it more often if they did.

Free or paid for?: I got two free bottles in the mail. Which is what I call very nice beer mail indeed.