‘The Real Peel’ is the most recent release in the Fernie brewery’s Bucket List IPA series, and touted as their grapefruit-enhanced, late-summer IPA, and the last one for this year, oddly.

This 650ml bottle pours a clear, bright medium golden yellow colour, with three fingers of puffy, chunky, and somewhat creamy dirty white head, which leaves some smudged and webbed sudsy lace around the glass as it lazily subsides.

It smells of gritty and grainy, pale and caramel malt, red grapefruit rind, further lemon and orange citrus notes, some hard water flintiness, and more leafy, weedy, and grassy green hoppiness.  The taste is bready and doughy caramel malt, a bit of additional crackery graininess, sort of sedate mixed grapefruit flesh and peel, alcohol-tinged lemon, and more earthy, leafy, and somewhat floral hops.  The bubbles are pretty laid-back in their simple and functional frothiness, the body a solid middleweight, and mostly smooth, maybe a bit of wayward hops and slowly simmering booziness bubbling up from below.  It finishes off-dry, but starting to think about trending towards the former, I suspect – lots of lingering malt and generic juicy citrus still abounding.

Overall, the grapefruit character seems a lot more melded into the citrusy characteristics of the hops, than able to truly stand on its own, which is no biggie, really.  An easy to drink, nice and fruity IPA, with a near 13-proof alcohol measure that more or less keeps to the shadows.  Yup, this is the ‘real peal’, ba dum tsh!