Straddie are in the sandpit again, and the thirteenth beer in this series has them playing with Veloria ale malt from Voyager, East Kent Goldings hops from the UK, and a strain of English ale yeast.
If you’ve just come back from a pub tour of London and have traditional English bitters fresh in your mind, be aware that this best bitter is right at the lighter end of the spectrum, almost drinking like a lager. It shines pale gold, gleaming like the inexplicably always-polished One Ring. Both the aroma and the taste serve up sweet bready malt with a touch of spice, and the mouthfeel stops juuust short of being thick; it’s on the cusp.
The beer certainly puts the "bitter" in "best bitter". It’s a soft kind of bitterness you encounter here, but powerful none the less; it builds up slowly but relentlessly. Like if you lay down and someone kept stacking pillows on you. And I mean they just kept going and going, piling them on you until there’s 10kg, 20kg, 30kg of pillows. They only add one pillow at a time and it seems gentle… but 30kg of pillows is still heavy. That’s how the bitterness builds as you drink.
And it fits all of this into a mid-strength; in fact, as I was drinking, I literally forgot this beer was only 3.7 percent ABV.
Mick Wüst
Published May 24, 2024 2024-05-24 00:00:00
