DAINTON BEER LUPE DE LUPE
Behind all the wisecracks was men are falling through the cracks of life. We must change that! Next time we meet with a mate rather than hiding our feelings behind the jokes, let’s share one of these and openly talk about our blackdogs.
Origin – Carrum Downs, Victoria
ABV – 6.5%
Size – 355mL can
Style – NEPIA
‘God never made a tougher son of a bitch than me.’ Having broken more than 40 bones in his body, including his back seven times, they were the final words of Daredevil Evel Knievel. Dressed as a superhero in his trademark red, white and blue jumpsuit and cape, Knievel once soared like the bald-headed eagle over 13 double-decker buses in Wembley Stadium. Yet it was the spectacular misses that earned him the title as the king of daredevils. Like the failure to clear a tank full of sharks in Chicago or the crash while jumping the fountains at Caesar’s Palace on the Las Vegas strip. The latter left him in a coma for a month!
As fate would have it, the maker of this Lupe de Lupe has a similar fame from failure narrative as the man who made famous the loop the loop, with Dan Dainton’s impetus for a future in brewing the result of being fired from a job by his uncle. Receiving a homebrew kit from his mum to cheer him up, Dainton quickly left a lack of success in the past and was soon working at James Squire. Followed by a stint at Holgate, he convinced his father Kevin to join him as a business partner to give it a go himself. The duo gypsy brewed their first beer in 2013, a boundary-pushing Red Eye Rye. It was added to James Halliday's 5-star beer listing, and Dainton Beer became an overnight success.
Since then, much like Knievel, Dan and Kev, and more recently head brewer Cam Turner have upped the ante with every launch (pun indeed). And while releasing a new canned beer every other week where little seems to be off-limits hasn't broken any bones, it has smashed the Craft Beer Awards record books to pieces. Given the likes of this collaboration with Hass hops, it's not surprising that the Carrum Downs brewery scooped up two Champion Beer trophies in three years. Exploiting the ultra concentrated Lupomax lupulin hop pellets technology (Hallertau Melon, Mosaic and Citra) results in a NEIPA that, as Dan puts it, 'blasts off the ramp with a juice explosion, soaring across your palate before touching down with a spectacularly satisfying finish'.
Evel Knievel notably once said, 'Anybody can jump a motorcycle. The trouble begins when you try to land it.' There’s no doubt Dainton's have landed this one!
