Arbitrating the arbitrary

Random shelf sweeps in off licences are a fairly routine part of my drinking life. A recent one turned up a bottle of Honey Brown Lager from the Sleeman brewery in Ontario. The amber colour (or "honey brown", if you prefer) is impressive, and there's a gently sweet honey aroma and foretaste. Coupled with the light carbonation and full mouthfeel, a sip of this is a pleasant experience. However, it's also a short-lived one. After a second the honey flavours give way to... nothing, and the drinker is left with just another quite tasteless North American lager. A shame, because a little tweaking could make this one of the very few genuinely tasty honey beers. I can't complain too much, however: with random selection, it's not the quality of the beer that counts so much as the knowledge it brings. *Tick*

Very occasionally, I get to do the opposite of random selection when a beer I've been looking for shows up on a shelf in front of me. Top of my want list, until yesterday, was Old Engine Oil from Harviestoun. My experiences with Bitter & Twisted and Schiehallion tell me that this crowd know a thing or two about making beer. While their other two are readily available in Dublin's better off licences, the lack of the final beer in their range seemed like an anomaly. Some distributor has now rectified that, thankfully.

The pour leaves one in no doubt why the brewer who invented it, an ex-engineer, bestowed this particular name on the beer: it's very thick and very black. Carbonation is light and results in only the thinnest of heads. There's an aroma of ripe, dark fruits which reminds me a lot of the Trappist ales. Unsurprisingly the mouthfeel is thick and chewy, as one gets with much stronger dark beers. Conversely, the taste is rather more subtle than one would expect for a dark beer of 6% ABV. That's not to say it isn't complex, however. The ripe fruit is there again, included in quite a sharp sourness. I served it chilled, as recommended, but found that the sourness gradually subsided as it warmed and was replaced by richer bitter chocolate notes. When combined with the lack of gas, this makes for some very smooth drinking indeed.

My bottle was dated March 2009, so I'm wondering if the sourness was a product of the beer being too young, as it may have been with the Westvleteren 8 I had recently. At the moment I have a box of beers I'm planning to set aside for a year or so to see if they improve. I reckon I'll throw one of these in there as well.

Flowers of Scotland

From Edinburgh comes Innis & Gunn, an exclusive-looking amber ale in a 33cl bottle. The unique selling point here is that it's aged for 77 days in whisky barrels which gives it a distinct oaky flavour as well as a scotch malt bitterness. This makes for a heady mix of strong flavours which I found a little overpowering, though there is a refreshing lightness at the back of the taste to stop it from taking over the palate entirely. Nevertheless, 33cl is enough of this one.

Of course, the Scots like their lager too, and the Harviestoun brewery make a fantastic one called Schiehallion. This beer has been very precisely crafted to just the right level of dryness and bitterness. There's a grainy complexity in the flavour too, making for a perfectly balanced lager. The same brewery make Bitter & Twisted which has a sharply bitter hops taste up front but again this is fine-tuned to keep it on the good side of tasty. The flavour is also tempered with a gentle lemony fruitness. Both of these Harviestoun beers are finely honed and plainly the work of people who know exactly what they're doing.

No run-down of Scottish beer would be complete without a return to an old favourite - Fraoch heather beer. There's really nothing else out there like this ale made from real heather. It's as easy to drink as any light ale or lager, but has an immesely complicated taste that defies description. Just try it.