BrewDog's Nanny State - Beer of the Week

Joshua M. Bernstein has written about brews, bars and booze for New York Magazine, Time Out New York, ForbesTraveler.com and The New York Times.

As far as the boys behind Scotland's rabble-rousing BrewDog are concerned, U.K. beer is as tasty as tepid tea.

Most breweries make "bland, lightly hopped and mildly malty beer," complains Martin Dickie, who co-founded BrewDog in 2007 along with James Watt. Compelled to "make the beers we want to drink ourselves," BrewDog took inspiration from boundary-busting American microbreweries, turning out the hoppy Punk IPA, the whiskey-cask-aged Paradox stout and the Zephyr, a double IPA aged with strawberries in wooden barrels.

"We are raising the bar of beer produced in the U.K.," Dickie explains.

While BrewDog has shown it can craft high-alcohol ales, it's equally adept at the opposite end of the spectrum. Case in point: Nanny State, a 1.1 percent ABV oddity that's cheekily dubbed a "mild imperial ale." But brewing a low-alcohol beer is no laughing matter: "It's pretty tough to get an appreciable mouthfeel in a beer so low in gravity," Dickie says. "We use seven kinds of malts to stand up against the onslaught of Humulus lupulus. We wanted to really give this beer a bite."

At first, Nanny State seems toothless. It pours a deep, dark amber with scant, sluggish carbonation. Had Nanny gone flat? But the pungent perfume of flowers, cut grass and pine promised a hop bounty, which was realized by the first sip: an uncompromising mouth-puckering bitterness, leavened by a light body and the muted flavors of biscuits and toasted caramel.

Nanny is a mad experiment that may only appeal to hop heads, but let's give BrewDog credit: They're pushing brewing's boundaries on both sides of the pond.

Does BrewDog's bark match its bite? Spill it in the comments.