My attempt at sophisticated drinking got as far as finding the first glass cup I could lay my hands on.
Tonight’s beer is a familiar one to most, Morland’s Old Speckled Hen.
This is one of those beers that you can’t avoid and nearly everyone has heard of, but I’ve never figured out why. Even my local Spar has it, and their real ale choice is this and Newcastle Brown. Indeed, that’s why I’ve ended up buying a bottle of it to take home, when my normal approach is to try anything with a mental shiny label and a name like Yoko Ono’s been dicking about with a Swedish dictionary.
I get a little sick of seeing it everywhere because the taste is so generic; there are a thousand other beers just like it and no reason not to try them rather than sticking with the same bloody thing over and over. In this way it’s guilty of being one of those ales that become so popular that they become ubiquitous, lose their charm and are eventually dethroned from their shiny position at the forefront of the bar. Spitfire suffered that fate some time ago if you ask me, and Greene King’s IPA is so common there’s no real appeal to getting another pint of it.
The beer reminds me of the first pint of Tetleys I ever had, which I thought I’d like based on the smell of beer wafting out from pubs, but actually felt queasy after drinking because it was so beery. I think that’s what sums it up for me – it’s one of the worst possible beers you could give to someone new to bitter. Everything about it is ultra-beer and if you don’t have the stomach for it, it won’t go down well.
These guys at BeerAdvocate (which is a misleading name since all they advocate is reducing everything down to a list of its chemical elements while slagging off the people who made it) come up with some staggeringly complex descriptions of it, while still failing to describe to anyone what it’s actually like to drink. So you should know:
- ONLY drink it if you can deal with shuddering slightly after each sip rapes the side of your tongue,
- DO NOT buy a pint of this if you have 20 minutes to kill before a train and think you’ll “slip a cheeky one in”, as you’ll curse the pain of trying to force it all down in the last five minutes,
- DO buy a pint if you don’t really like real ale but want to buy a pint of it in front of some blokes from work at Friday dinner so they think you’re a proper man who knows shit about beer.
So, a thumbs down from me. It’s not a bad beer, it’s just a pretty intense version of its type.
Beers · Greene King · Morland · Old Speckled Hen · Spitfire
Author comment by Mike Laybourne · March 5, 2010 at 12:51pm
It’s likely that most people have heard of Hen because they sponsor something on Dave.
I had a bottle of Hen last week and I found it to be generally unoffensive. The local sometimes has it on tap too. I’m not averse to a pint of Hen, but only if there’s nothing better available.