Categories
beer reviews bottled beer real ale

Beer of the Year

This is the kind of thing we usually chicken out of but, in the pub one night this week, we thrashed it out and made a decision.

We’ve been quietly naming a beer of the week almost every week since February and so looked over that list first to see if any of the candidates leapt out. The full list is below, after the jump, if you’re interested.

We decided, on reflection, that there were certain beers we not only enjoyed but kept coming back to. We had multiple pints of St Austell Tribute, Thornbridge Jaipur and Fuller’s ESB.  We drank many bottles of Sam Smith’s Taddy Porter, Brew Dog’s Punk IPA, Anchor Liberty Ale, Pilsner Urquell and Flying Dog Old Scratch (our stand-by beer this summer). We would keep going back for Wuerzburger Hofbrau Pils if we lived anywhere near Wuerzburg.

But one beer that we’d never mentioned as beer of the week, and which always delights us, is Dark Star Hophead. Dark Star might be our favourite UK brewery, if we have to choose, and Hophead is one of the best of their beers. It’s not too strong (several pints won’t kill you) but absolutely bursting with freshness and up-front hop flavour. It’s a corker. We love it. We’re going to drink lots more of it in 2010.