22 oz bottle, thanks go out to Shogokawada for the chance to try this. Bottled Aug 2010, 1st Batch.
Pour is a pretty light amber color with plenty of orange color. Quite hazed. A little head, a tiny bit of lace but not much retention. It looks a bit muddy.
The nose does not give way to any hop character, rather it gives a simple, malt sweetness and not a great deal more.
The tastes are intensely bitter in several areas. The front end is not too intense, but the middle, back end and finish are really quite shrap. It’s not subtle at all. Strange really, becasue the beer is held togeher by a decent, biscuit like, English malt framework, but the beer also deviates fairly dramatically from highly hopped version of an English Ale (which is what one might think this would resemble).
The bitterness is obviously the feature here, and that’s all well and good, but to me it sits a little awkwardly against the malt bill that it is coupled with. It’s just not especially drinkable for me, and it seems as if there are two separate, competing factors. Not bad, just a bit awkward. For me, it gets caught between an English Pale Ale and West Coast hop bomb. Weird.