Last night saw a marvellous evening's tasting over at Ed's house, Bunker HQ, in the charming village of Ringwood.As well as the commandant's fine home made pizza (home grown vegetables and self cured ham!) a tidy range of ales were sampled which I think I can recall in order and attribute a vague personal Bunker rating to:
Postman's Knock (Hobson's) - a beautiful treacle ruby from Staffordshire (8)
Bootlegger (Independence) - A facsimile of a sturdy northern UK brown ale, not bad (6)
Boondoggle (Ringwood) - A summery Ringwood ale that sits quite well in a bottle (7)
90 Min IPA (Dogfish Head) - Delicious and strong, a wonderful US IPA in a Belgian style (9)
Raison d'Etre (Dogfish Head) - US, raisiny and lush. Lovely texture and pour (8)
Kingfisher (United) - Nice fresh lager to have with the pizza! (lager/unrated)
Great Bustard (Stonehenge) - A fine hearty ale, malty and rich (8)
Hobgoblin (Wychwood) - Chocolatey and involving. Good enough for a President. (7)
Old Engine Oil (Harvestoun) - I loved this. Syrupy, viscous and black as the devil's heart. (8)
Ola Dubh (Harvestoun) - Amazing. A christmas pudding of an ale. Sumptuous, luxuriating and rewarding (9)
I think that was it. Things got slightly fuzzy....
- The Broadside
Nice list of beers chaps and I like the sidebar explaining the new style ratings - I just find marking them out of ten too hard, esp. when halfcut! ;)
ReplyDeleteThank you Baron - we had a long chat about whether to go to 10 or not, we were just finding too many 4* beers that we wanted to differentiate. We settled on going to 10 if we could find a keyword for each number suitably different from the preceding value. It kinda works.
ReplyDeletePoor old Ed had to go through about three times as many reviews as me to rescore! Agree with your comments on the Engine Oil - bit too dark for my colleague but I found it very rewarding.