Lucky Saint 0.5% Hazy IPA

The pour is where it starts, no compromise here - it heads up exactly like a proper canned IPA, and that head sticks around for the whole glass rather than vanishing in the first few sips. Visually it's textbook: cloudy, pale amber and orange, the kind of look that tells you what you're getting before you've even smelled it. And the nose backs that up. Plenty of fragrance, a classic hop character that makes itself known without going up your nose and taking over. Citrus forward, but it stays IPA - it never wanders off into cider territory the way some AF IPAs have in the past. The taste is where this one properly earns it. I wasn't expecting bad, but I wasn't expecting this good either. The hop profile is close to perfect - it lingers on the tongue without ever muscling out the citrus notes sitting alongside it. And that's the bit that matters most. This is what's been missing from AF IPAs for me: that lingering hop finish. So many alcohol free IPAs get the smell and the first taste right, then the flavour just falls off a cliff - it's genuinely anticlimactic. Lucky Saint does the opposite. The flavour doesn't drop away, it quietly fades, leaving your tastebuds sat in that fresh hop character right to the end. This is my first proper review on here, and it's set a high bar. Going to be a tough one for the next IPA to beat. As someone who's embraced sober life, this is about as close to the real thing as I've had. Should honestly be the benchmark every other AF IPA gets measured against. Cheers 🍻