Tesco’s beer selection was poor tonight. My continued search for Titanic Stout goes on. Not wanting to leave empty handed, I opted for a bottle for Ruddles County as I’ve never had it before. The bottle promises the flavours of dark toffee and a crisp bitterness. At 4.7% volume, it seems the perfect partner for a good hearty meatloaf cooked by herself.

First impressions are that it doesn’t have any particular aroma to it. I know it’s not wine but I like to start tasting my ale before it actually hits my tongue. Without a particular smell, there’s less anticipation of the wonders to follow. Maybe it’s jut me. As for the taste, well I couldn’t taste toffee, not at first but after about half a pint, the toffee flavour appears and lingers for a while. The bitterness was crisp but not overpowering. There’s a light hoppy taste which sits well.

If I had to look for a negative for this beer, it would have to be that although it isn’t bland, it has a generic taste. The generic taste is enjoyable and I’m sure there’s an apt time and place but as for something new and exciting? This isn’t it. Maybe it suffers from having been around for a while. Is it nice? Yes. Would I drink it again? Certainly.

Did it rock my face? No, not really.

Can I still taste toffee? Yes.

Beers · Ruddles County

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

Wigan’s beer festival is just getting underway as I write this, and I’ll be over there tomorrow afternoon to see what it’s like these days. I haven’t been for a good six or seven years, when I went with a few of my uncles, we all fell out and ended up making a frankly bizarre attempt to con our way in with an out of date CAMRA card. That it was about 50p to get in didn’t seem to matter to us after five pints around Wigan beforehand.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a little less stupid as I’m just over for the afternoon session with my sister. Oh yes – the afternoon “quiet session”, my second favourite piece of beer terminology (behind “drinking career” but just ahead of “session beer”). Having been to quite a few afternoon sessions now, I have found that it really is quite a good description for the atmosphere, a blend of studious beer appreciation with banter without the din of a blues band in the background.

I’ll report back on how it goes, along with a look back at Wednesday’s day out with Matt along the Transpennine Real Ale Trail.

Beer festival · Beers · CAMRA · Transpennine Real Ale Trail · Wigan

What would wine be like if it had grown up English? Or, to put it another way, what would real ale be like if it was French? What I’m getting at is this: the French like to make things complicated. Paris, for instance, has 3 seperate underground rail networks all on top of each other, while it’s only possible to utilise the language over there properly if you know the gender of a coffee table.

This love of needless complexity is best demonstrated via wine through which the French have taken the relatively simple process of fermenting grapes to make a pleasant alcoholic beverage and infused it with all sorts of rules and guidelines about what wine should be consumed with what food and a style of writing tasting notes that would leave James Joyce in his ‘Finnegans Wake’ days breathless with their impenetrability.

Meanwhile in Blighty, the brewing industry has been missing out on this trick for years and has only recently tried to gourmet itself up and now it seems every bottle worth it’s salt comes with a flowery description of the rapture you’ll recieve when you shove the drink into your face. Which makes tonight’s beer all the more intriguing.

From the label on the back of a bottle of Purity Mad Goose (current frontrunner for the coveted Badpoo award of ‘Beer That Sounds Most Like A Peter Gabriel Era Genesis Album Title’) and you’ll find a thorough breakdown of what’s gone into the brew- Maris Otter, Caragold and Wheat Malt with Hallertau brewing hops and Cascade and Willamette aroma hops since you ask- but beyone that the preview of the taste is limited to ‘great hop character and citrus overtones’ which you can pretty much deduce by reading the words ‘Pale Ale’ on the front.

Frankly, I’m not sure this will do anymore. We live in a world where not only are our alcoholic drinks dissected in tasting notes before we actualy taste them, but film trailers handily condense all the good bits of a movie into 2 crash-bang minutes and TV shows actively promote what’s going to happen in them just so people will tune in to see exactly what they’ve been told would occur actually occurring. Now I find I’m venturing into a bottle of beer without a detailled guide and full set of directions.

It’s a good job, then, that this is a belter. And that’s all I’m going to tell you- go and try it yourselves. If the people at Purity want to keep a little mystery alive before you taste their wares than I’m not going to spoil the party. Except to say that it’s got a great hop character and citrus overtones.

However, to finish, we can take a different cue from the world of wine and discuss what sort of thing this drink would be a perfect accompaniment for- much in the same way that we all know Merlot is nice with steak and it’s a terrible faux pas to drink a dry white while eating a Mars Bar. Here’s a few examples of things which would be enhanced by a pint of Purity Mad Goose:

- Chicken
- Fish
- Pork
- Crisps
- Nuts
- Watching ‘Cheers’
- Doing the hoovering
- Juggling
- Yelling
- Life

Beers · mad goose · pale ale · purity · review