Hops & Cans Subscription Review – 8 beers, 2 snacks, great price and great variety

When it comes to beer subscription boxes they often fall into one of three different categories: 1) An opportunity to get cheap beer that you like from a specific brand — much like getting coffee on subscription 2) An opportunity to get something familiar and safe — like how we’d hope Online Supermarket Order Replacements would work, or 3) Getting something new and fantastical, exploring new avenues, and widening your horizons. Hops & Cans is a great example of the latter, which is super handy as that’s my favourite of the three options I mentioned.

Hops & Cans is a boutique beer subscription model which gives you eight beers and two snacks each month for £30 a month. The team there guarantee that if you subscribe for a year you won’t get the same beer twice, which means that — in the least — they have a rotation of at least 96 beers. They also guarantee that a box isn’t just going to be stuffed with beers from the same brewery, with a maximum of four beers in a box from any one of their partners. That’s important, because for me, Hops & Cans’ strength is its variety.

The team at Hops & Cans currently offer four categories of beer: Dark Beers, IPA & Pale Ale, Sour Beer and a Brewmaster’s Mixed box. I normally fluctuate between stouts and ales (although not IPAs) when drinking but decided to change things up as I’ve not had much experience with Sour Beers before. The team there kindly sent us along a box to try. Needless to say, I was really impressed with the selection.

For a start, as you can see in the gallery above, there’s actually a massive variety in colour between the different sour beer and gose that are included in the box. My box contained: Pilot, Pineapple Berliner; Great Beyond Brewing Co, The Raspberry Incident; Marble Beers, Nilsson (Lime & Coconut Gose); Pilot, Peach Melba Sour; Gwei-Lo, Rainbow Sherbet Sour; PDBC, Live For Today; Quantock Brewery, Is This The Way To Ameretto; and Mad Squirrel, Elephant Juice. While most of the flavours orbit the ‘Citrus Fruit’ side of things, there were some real delights in there… and, can I repeat again, look at the variety of colours on show too!

The Raspberry Incident, with it’s rich-red colour wasn’t just a standout for how it looked. I’d never tried a sour beer that hit the mark quite so precisely. Most sours often focus on delivering either the upfront or aftertaste bile-like pang of a sour and rarely focus on delivering a potent, smooth flavour in the middle, Great Beyond completely nailed the delivery of all three of the flavour points, and made a really solid sour beer.

But, favourite aside, I learned about a whole bunch of new beers that I hadn’t tried before because of this box. In fact, I’d say that I’d only had two of the eight beforehand, and I’d never tried a gose before. (A gose, for the curious, is a warm, German-style sour beer that’s normally unfiltered — meaning it does feature sediment.) I also thought it was really smart of them to include the Berliner from Pilot, which feels welcome in the mix even if its name infers its of an older style of beer. There’s clearly been quite a bit of care put into the categorisation and grouping of the beers.

In addition to the eight beers there was also two snacks in the box, as there is in each of their boxes. In this case it was Chikas Lime + Chilli, which is a really nice nut mix that goes great with the goses, and Soffle’s Pitta chips in Chilli & Garlic which are a strong tasting little nibble that does a great job of completely altering your palette between sips.

I really enjoyed Hops & Cans Sour Box. From the malty-meets-pineapple of Pilot’s Pineapple Berliner to the almost marshmallow whiff of Marble Beer’s Lime & Coconut Gose, there were some real surprises in there. Raspberry, as it turns out, is one of my favourite flavours to peek out through the beer, and with it featuring in The Raspberry Incident and PDBC’s Live For Today I was pretty spoilt with this box.

Originally I intended for this write-up to touch on reviews of each of the beers, but I ended up waffling on like a wine taster about how The Raspberry Incident reminded me of my first sour beer, drunk in Malmo while chowing down on Reuben sandwiches, or how the Rainbow Sherbet Sour reminded me of old British sweets, but I think the box’s variety more than speaks for itself.

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