New Realm American Pale Ale at the Rising Sun, Redditch

For a beer ticker like me, it’s crucial to find out whether I’ve tried a beer before or not before I can tick it off. There’s hundreds of IPAs out there, and the only way of distinguishing them is by where it’s brewed. This isn’t necessarily the same brewer or the same recipe. Often a brewer will visit another brewery to create their beer; particularly international ones who bring their recipes to make a guest beer. It means that they use different water and different ingredients; as these would be very expensive to ship over. So a beer brewed this side of the pond could be very different to it being stateside. Of course, you could calibrate a laboratory to re-create the same pH and cloudiness of the water, but it simply won’t be the same. There’s also the cuckoo breweries; smaller brewers which brew at a bigger plant to experiment with new beers.