Opened cold and poured hard from a 473ml can into whatever was clean. Black to the edges, the pour viscous enough to coat the glass on the way in.
Fuggle / East Kent Golding over a maris otter / brown / chocolate base, finishing at 3.6% with 22 IBU. The restraint in that grain bill is the reason the rest of it works.
Everything good about this happens after you swallow. Fuggle / East Kent Golding carries the middle, the finish arrives dry and stays dry, and the last mouthful tastes like the first. Very few stouts and porters manage that.
The whole point of a beer at 3.6% is the second and third glass, and this survives both. There is no cloying edge, no fatigue in the finish, and the hop character stays legible right through. That is harder to achieve than a big beer, and it gets a fraction of the credit.
Getting flavour into a beer this light is the hardest trick in brewing, and there is nowhere to hide when it fails. This does not fail.
This is a perfectly competent beer with nothing much to say for itself, and there is no shame in that. At $3.90 / 473ml it is a reasonable trade. Whether you would choose it over the two better things beside it on the shelf is a different question.
Bought at Rainhard Taproom (draft only at the time of writing). Cask if you can find it. Cold and carbonated it loses half its point.
Fine. It is fine. There are worse things on that shelf and several better.
