Tasting Notes
- Appearance: Soft, hazy gold with a warm orange tint, glowing slightly in the glass. A fluffy, cloud-like head that lingers just long enough to suggest softness rather than sharpness.
- Aroma: Immediate tropical fruit character with ripe mango, peach, and a hint of pineapple. Citrus zest lifts through the sweetness, adding brightness and a faint tang that keeps the aroma lively.
- First Sip: Juicy and fruit-forward from the outset, with mango and stone fruit leading. The texture is soft and rounded rather than crisp.
- Mid-Palate: Citrus begins to assert itself, bringing a gentle bitterness that balances the tropical sweetness. Hops remain expressive but not aggressive, keeping everything smooth and integrated.
- Mouthfeel: Light to medium body with a soft, almost velvety texture. Carbonation is gentle, enhancing drinkability without adding sharp edges.
- Finish: Clean, slightly dry, with lingering tropical fruit and a soft citrus echo that fades gradually rather than abruptly.
- Overall impression: A modern hazy pale ale that prioritises softness, fruit expression, and drinkability. It is playful in character but carefully constructed, with balance rather than intensity at its core.
Clarky Cat: A Beer with Personality Before It Has Even Been Poured
Some beers introduce themselves politely and stay exactly where you expect them to be. Clarky Cat does not behave like that. It feels less like a product and more like a character that has wandered in from somewhere slightly surreal, carrying a story you are not entirely sure you have been told correctly.
From Pomona Island Brew Co, this is a beer that arrives with intent and personality already attached. The name itself suggests mischief before you even reach the glass, and once poured, the beer seems to match that tone without ever losing control of its structure.
The Brewery: Pomona Island Brew Co and Its World of Playful Experimentation
Pomona Island Brew Co was founded in 2017 in Manchester, taking its name from Pomona Island, a once-industrial stretch of land surrounded by canals and shaped by the city’s manufacturing history.
That origin matters because it mirrors the brewery’s identity. There is something slightly hidden, slightly unconventional about both the place and the beer that carries its name. Pomona Island Brew Co has become known for combining technical brewing precision with a sense of humour and creative unpredictability that runs through its branding and beer names.
In Manchester, a city built on reinvention, that approach feels at home. The brewery sits within a wider landscape of independent producers who are not afraid to treat beer as both craft and narrative, where flavour and storytelling often overlap.
Flavour Character: Juicy, Hazy, and Slightly Unpredictable
Clarky Cat is a double dry-hopped pale ale built on Citra, Strata, and Mosaic, which immediately places it in the modern hazy spectrum of beer styles. But what distinguishes it is not just hop selection, but the way those hops are expressed.
The first impression is soft fruit saturation. Mango and peach sit at the front, giving the beer a ripe, almost juicy character that feels rounded rather than sharp. Citrus follows behind, not as a dominant force but as a bright lift that keeps the sweetness from becoming heavy. As it develops on the palate, the beer shifts between softness and structure. One moment it feels pillowy and fruit-led, the next it tightens slightly with a gentle citrus bitterness that brings clarity. It never becomes rigid or overly technical, but it does move in subtle stages that keep it interesting from sip to sip.
The finish is clean and lightly dry, with fruit still lingering at the edges rather than disappearing completely.
Aroma: Tropical Drift with a Citrus Edge
On the nose, Clarky Cat opens in layers. Tropical fruit appears first, full and inviting, with mango leading and softer stone-fruit notes following behind. Citrus then weaves through this sweetness, adding a flicker of brightness that keeps the aroma from settling into one place. There is a sense of movement even before tasting, as if the beer is shifting slightly in character depending on how long you hold the glass.
Mouthfeel: Softness at the Core
Despite its expressive hop profile, Clarky Cat remains fundamentally soft in texture. The body is smooth and lightly velvety, with carbonation that supports rather than interrupts. It feels designed for ease of drinking, where flavour is present but never forceful. This softness is part of what makes the beer so approachable. It carries flavour without weight, allowing the fruit character to remain central without becoming overwhelming.
The Name: Playful Identity and Surreal Storytelling
With Pomona Island Brew Co, names are rarely incidental, and Clarky Cat is no exception. It reads like a fragment of pub folklore, a half-remembered character from a story that may or may not have been real in the first place. There is humour in it, but also a sense of narrative looseness, where meaning is implied rather than explained. This fits neatly into the brewery’s wider style, where beer names often feel like they belong to a shared fictional universe that exists just slightly out of reach. Clarky Cat becomes more than a label. It becomes part of how the beer is experienced, shaping expectation before the first sip even lands.
The Name: Who (or What) is Clarky Cat?
With Pomona Island, names are never accidental. The strange, looping nonsense of Clarky Cat’s fictional 'drug' mythology leans fully into absurdist British humour, reading like a lost fragment of surreal sketch comedy. Lines like 'I don't want my arms to feel like a couple of fortnights in a bad balloon' and the chaotic repetition of 'jessop jessop jessop…' echo the disjointed, exaggerated slang of shows like The Mighty Boosh or Brass Eye, where language itself becomes the joke. By inventing a completely unreal substance, alongside equally nonsensical rules about mandrills and street-corner transactions, Pomona Island blur the line between parody and world-building, creating a kind of mock-urban folklore grounded in internet IYKYK (if you know, you know) culture. It’s deliberately meaningless, yet oddly evocative, capturing the rhythm of pub storytelling gone off the rails, where exaggeration, repetition, and surreal imagery combine to create something that feels both familiar and completely unhinged. This is part of the brewery’s charm. Their beers don’t just exist; they arrive with personality, with narrative, with a sense that something slightly odd is going on behind the scenes.Final Thoughts: Controlled Chaos in a Glass
Clarky Cat works because it holds two ideas at once without letting either take over. It is playful in name and concept, but precise in execution. It is expressive in flavour, but controlled in structure.
Produced by Pomona Island Brew Co, it sits comfortably within the modern hazy pale ale tradition, but distinguishes itself through personality as much as brewing technique.
It is not a beer that demands analysis while you are drinking it, but it rewards attention if you give it. It shifts, it softens, it brightens, and it settles, always staying just unpredictable enough to feel alive.
In a crowded field of hazy pales, Clarky Cat stands out not by being louder, but by feeling like it has a story it is only half telling you.
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