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beer reviews bottled beer

Marston’s Old Empire IPA

Marston's Old Empire IPA.Ever topical, a mere ten years after its first release, having mentioned it yesterday, we finally got round to trying Marston’s Old Empire with our reviewing hats on.

Before we talk about the taste, there are a few prejudices on our part we ought to ‘fess up.

  1. It’s in a clear glass bottle. Though some brewers have rolled their eyes at us for banging on about this, we’ve had overwhelmingly bad experiences with beer from marketing-led packaging of this type, and, despite choosing a bottle from the shadows at the back of the shelf, went in expecting ‘skunking’.
  2. The marketing schtick is full of dodgy history and the recipe is a compromise. On the one hand, it repeats the myth that it’s not a ‘real’ IPA if it’s not strong and aromatically hoppy; and then, on the other, the brewers admitted at the time of launch that they’d made it weaker than the ‘real’ IPAs it was supposed to mimic for commercial reasons, and used Cascade hops because they were hip in 2003.
  3. Marston’s? Meh. We’ve only had one Marston’s beer that’s really excited us in recent years, and that was probably a fluke. They’re simply not, on the whole, terribly characterful.

First impressions were bad, and the unmistakeable whiff of light-strike made the first mouthfuls hard going. After some efforts to pin down what specifically it reminded us of, the answer proved to be pretty obvious: Corona lager. We were close to giving up a third of a way in but, then, something began to happen that stopped us in our tracks.

“By the ‘eck,” we managed to mutter with puckered mouths, “it’s bloody bitter!” With each gulp, the back of our throats became drier. The beer, at 5.7% ABV, isn’t weak, but every spot of sugariness has been fermented out, leaving it rather thin and austere, bringing to mind something like the famously bitter Jever Pils from the north of Germany. Is that what slugs feel like when they have salt poured on them?

As we got used to the skunkiness and began to zone it out, a few subtleties of flavour and aroma emerged, too: medicinal throat lozenges (honey, lemon, ginger?); nettles or bitter herbs; and, perhaps wrapped up with that serious bitterness, something like cold Earl Grey tea.

Overall, we were left feeling that what could be a classic is being let down by shoddy packaging. The IPA they brew for Sainsbury’s is stronger (5.9%) and comes in a grown-up brown bottle, so we’d probably recommend that over Old Empire.

Categories
beer reviews Blogging and writing

Change of mind but Google never forgets

Google result for a beer-related search.

This weekend, we decided to give Cornish brewery St Austell’s Korev lager (“with soul“) another go having written it off last year. As we’d hoped might be the case, knowing that the head brewer is a meticulous perfectionist, it has improved enormously. It seemed lighter, cleaner, drier and snappily bitter. It’s still not the world’s most exciting lager but it’s certainly not nasty — a Bitburger, perhaps, rather than a Foster’s.

Unfortunately, our previous review, with the dismissive ‘blech!’ in the title, looms high in the Google results for ‘Korev lager’. It was an accurate summary of our feelings at the time and, having praised St Austell’s others beers fairly consistently, we figured it wouldn’t hurt to give some honest public criticism of this one.

On the flipside, we had an incredibly exciting couple of bottles of the IPA Marston’s brew for Sainsbury’s — it blew our minds — only to find it bland on every subsequent occasion. Our gushing comments based on that first experience, however, are there for all the world to see and, again, appear on the first page of results from Google when we search ‘Marston’s sainsbury’s IPA’.

We think we’re always clear that any reviews are our impression of the product as we experienced it; and every post is dated. Everyone knows that beers change over time, from pub to pub, bottle to bottle; and we acknowledge that our palates change, too. But what if people only read as far as ‘Korev lager — blech!”?

We don’t want people not to buy Korev because we didn’t like it a year ago, or to feel cheated buying Marston’s IPA because we had a couple of good bottles once. It’s fortunate, then, that so few people Google brands before deciding what to buy at point of sale and that even fewer would base their decision on the word of one poxy blog.

Categories
Generalisations about beer culture

Small mercies

The only social situation where you’re less likely to find decent beer than a wedding is a work Christmas do.

In the kinds of hotels, chain restaurants and pubs where these things tend to take place, you thank God for small mercies. For example, when faced with three kegged lagers and smooth flow Marston’s Pedigree, kegged Marston’s Oyster Stout is at least something new. And it wasn’t bad with a big roast dinner, either.

At a Mexican restaurant in Covent Garden, where the waiter was desperate to push a ‘bucket of Corona’, there was Negra Modelo: yes, it’s boring, but there’s a ghost of a malt flavour in there, and it’s not skunked. It’s better than water, and certainly better than cheap tequila.