Sail and Anchor new range reviews

Righto, post #365 (and on Christmas Day no less) deserves something special - here we go with a back-to-back, side by side tasting of the new range from Sail & Anchor.

Yes - it's a pub partially owned by faux-craft-hungry Woolworths branching out into its own range. Yes, these new beers have the potential to skew the focus of said establishment and its taps moving forward. But it's also one of the best beer bars in Australia we're talking about here - a place that consistently sources absolutely top shelf craft beer from around the world up to and including sours and other confronting styles.

As such I was cautiously optimistic heading into this. If Sail (well, Gage Roads) could produce a decent sort of range here it could only be a good thing both to cement it as a Freo institution, and to help drive more and more patrons toward craft beer. To put it more clearly, I want these to be good. I want them to succeed.

First impression having seen the range is it's disappointingly uninventive in what is a booming, exciting industry. Of four beers we have three potentially very similar styles: a 'pale', an 'amber', and a 'golden' - the other being a kolsch (incidentally, all four come out at pretty much exactly the same abv too, not a great sign). They're all named after sailors' knots, and marketed, well, interestingly.

Regardless, it's with the 4.6% Cat's Shank Kolsch we start.

I poured this one right down the middle of a large Weihenstephaner glass while chanting "the power of glass compels ye!" to try to induce a real German effort here, so the excess head isn't the beer's fault. It did however disappear pretty quickly.. pretty loose and shortlived. The beer itself is so clear as to be mystifying as to how they've filtered it.. it literally looks like light yellow water. You can easily read a computer screen through the glass. Weird. I don't know, maybe the average consumer really rates clarity or something, but as a brewer it just seems really very artificial when targeted to this level. Certainly doesn't look like beer.

The aroma isn't bad, sort of wheaty German notes playing with a note of lemon. But the flavour itself is gone in an instant, a fleeting miasma of sweet macro beer notes and candied lemon. Carbonation is admirably low here (at least, if you smash it in a big glass) which provides no barrier at all to basically inhaling this.

Inoffensive but unmemorable beer. Not bad.. but hard to find any really redeeming features either. 4.0


Next up the amber. Nice hops on the nose actually, darker hue but still very transparent.

Ambers can be pretty insipid stuff when done wrong, and this too carries a character of mostly (only?) miscellaneous sweet malts. It's not too bad ice-cold first up and the blatant overcarbonation at least hides the sweetness a little.

Once it settles however this becomes a real "vodka-cruiser" sort of a 5%-er, sugary rather than malty, processed feeling, not great. Too sweet by a distance. 3.5


Next up the pale ale, chosen because I frankly couldn't handle the thought of drinking a "golden" straight after that amber.

To be frank though this is the worst thus far - insipid clear yellow pour, indistinct sweet nose, horrid sweet brewkit sort of a sticky body, no hops to speak of, utter rubbish.

There is a vague hint of woody Australian yeast in the background there but it's a slap in the face to the wider industry. Why is it sometimes brewers (or perhaps more accurately marketers) choose 'pale ale' as the slops bucket for all their junk? Couldn't finish it, undrinkable. 2.0


Finally the Golden.

Again - and expected by now - this is unnaturally clear. It's a reasonable hue though for the golden moniker, shame the fluffy white head doesn't hang around.

I complained about the 'sameness' of these beers earlier - this illustrates it nicely in actively calling itself "amber" on the label. Smells of not much at all to be honest, maybe just a hint of noble hops. Vague sweetness.

Jesus it's an unexpected taste .. slightly fizzy again but wow, what this is I really don't know. It has a sweaty, old clothing sort of aroma when you first drink it and doesn't do anything to improve from there before a fizzy tonic water finish. Really quite disturbing. What have they done here? I have no idea how I'd even go about recreating this in the brewhouse - not that you'd want to. Horrible. 0.5


Overall then this is pretty poor. Given the commercial interests in play here I wasn't expecting brilliance or anything outrageous: it was always going to be a "peoples' session beer" sort of approach, and there's nothing at all inherently wrong with that. The sceptical part of me would also expect things to degrade over time after launch once the line is established, but for the beer on day one to come out like this is a real disappointment. It reeks of cost cutting, profiteering, and either a disdain or misreading of the clientele who have made this place what it is.

Given that four taps are permanently burdened with these at the Sail now, and other signs (lack of guest tap labels / crippled beer menu etc) pointing toward pushing them out, to a craft beer fan it's really not a good sign for the pub as a whole. Here's hoping it's not the beginning of the end.