2 May 2016 - Best Beer HQ

Liberty Alpha Lord Fresh Hop Imperial Pilsner review

It’s fresh hop season in New Zealand (hooray!), and to celebrate Kiwi craft brewers have been spamming the local market with fresh-hopped beers that are so hoppy they’ll make a hop-head like me hop around in delight.

Beers like this one – the delightfully presented Alpha Lord Fresh Hop Imperial Pilsner by Auckland brewery Liberty Brewing Co, which sports some kind of awesome green hop-creature-from-the-black-lagoon on its label.

Now let’s see if I’ll worship the Alpha Lord, or if it’ll be just another false prophet of doom…

ABV: 7.8%

Blurb on the bottle: Reborn annually on a green moon, walking between souls to a drum beat of insanity. With a lost voice like the footsteps of the dead, he recruits a fresh army of interbred hop beasts to colonise and conquer the human race.

Alpha Lord’s menacing hop heritage of Motueka and Cascade is a corrupted blood line creating a potion of alpha acids that will shrivel your tongue, forcing acrid green tears to run down your face. As this imperial pilsner infuses into your soul you become a slave to the Alpha Lord’s bitter kingdom of madness and bliss.

Tastes like: A pilsner on steroids.

This ain’t your granddaddy’s idea of a pale lager; it’s stronger, fruiter, a heck of a lot more potent – and it sure packs one hell of a punch. I must admit that I haven’t had an imperial pilsner like this one before, but I’m certainly enjoying it.

Alpha Lord is a lively, exuberant brew that’s rich and malty, with a sweet fruit finish. You can taste the herbaceous (is that a word?) characters of the fresh hops, but it’s not as resinous as these green fresh hop beers can typically be.

You can definitely taste the alcohol – and feel it, too. I had a good beer buzz going after a couple of glasses of Alpha Lord, so it’s definitely not the type of beer to drink if you’ve got to drive anywhere later. Instead, this is a good crash-out-on-the-couch beer, a good beer to share with mates, or a good one to savour while you watch a movie.

Beer/movie pairing: Just as this imperial pilsner makes you a “slave to the Alpha Lord’s bitter kingdom of madness and bliss” (according to the blurb on the bottle), the one-and-only Bela Lugosi turns people into zombie slaves in the classic 1932 horror flick White Zombie.

The dead walk among us!

Craft Beer New Zealand / review /

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