Not a lot

"BEHOLD the arcane mysteries of Magic Hat No. 9!" said everyone to me, "What convoluted esoteria lie at the heart of its profoundly enigmatic taste? Also: WooOOOooo!" [waggly fingers]. Like the sullen eight-year-old watching a weekend conjuror, I was prepared to be unimpressed. But I opened the bottle anyway.

It's an innocent, pleasant clear amber colour, 5.1% ABV with lots of busy fizz and described on the label as a "not quite pale ale" [waggly fingers]. It comes from a big factory in upstate New York. The aroma is carbonic at first: the fizz leaps out and pinches my nose, and underneath it smells of sweet, rather artificial, apricots.

My perceptions, I regret to say, were not fundamentally altered upon the first sip. What struck me at the beginning is how thin it is, all that fizz has free rein to trample everything else. The main flavour is a sherbety candy sort of thing: Skittles would be my nearest approximation, the wife opted for Kola Kubes, but either way we're firmly in the pick 'n' mix aisle. There's no real finish or aftertaste to speak of.

Part of me would like to think there's some potential in the recipe, that it could be interesting if given a bigger malt base to work from with less interference from the carbonation. But in all honesty I think this is another of those not-quite-really-beer beers, to be filed next to the Desperados and Crabbie's.

Can I have cake now?

From the weedpatch

It's a couple of years since Hall & Woodhouse's collaboration with River Cottage was the talk of the beerweb. Actually, you don't hear much from the Badger brand at all these days. I'd sort of forgotten about them until I spotted two of the River Cottage / Badger beers on the shelf of an off licence recently. I hadn't even realised there was a new one.

The original is Stinger, made with nettles for a "tongue tingling" sensation. Well maybe it takes a bit more to get my jaded old tongue tingling these days, but this wasn't doing it. The first thing I noticed was that despite the greener-than-thou organic badging and copious information on the hop:malt:fruit ratios on the label, there was no actual listing of ingredients. And when breweries throw odd things into their beers they usually follow it with a hefty bag or two of sugar, just to be sure. I think that's what's happened here: you get a heavy, thick, syrupy golden ale without much by way of aroma. There's a spice to it as well, buried quite deep, but I challenge anyone to drink it and tell me it tastes of nettles. Mind you, this is apparently what proper nettle beer tastes like, and this is a measure of its quality so maybe the bags of sugar were a good idea.

I expected more of the same from the dandelion one, called Dandelion ("Stinger" having exhausted the branding guys' imaginations). This time the sugar does add a bit of character -- it may even be brown sugar -- but beyond it there's absolutely nothing: another sweet syrupy ale with maybe a tiny herbal complexity at the back, but nothing that would make you think of dandelions.

I shouldn't really have consumed them back to back. I started to get a bit angry. I mean: how hard is it to do this sort of thing properly? Williams Brothers, for instance, turn out some fantastic beers with heather and spruce and seaweed. I've made one gruit ale once, flavoured mostly with yarrow and sage, and it was pretty damn drinkable. Marketable, even. So why is it that so many brewers, English ones in particular, think that when you break from the malt/hops norm you have to turn the whole thing into an alcopop? These ones may have organic credentials and a chef off the telly but they're really nothing more than Crabbie's in disguise, and a short skip through the meadow from blue WKD.

Stuff like this gives unusal ingredients in beer a dreadful reputation (though, granted, Dave in the links above isn't helping either). What's wrong with a bit more diversity?

Spot the craft

It's been a while since I last did a blind beer tasting at home. It was only when I noticed I had three ginger beers in the stash that I reckoned one was on the cards. One of them was the seemingly ubiquitous Crabbie's, a beer I'd heard a lot about and none of it good ("it's basically an alcopop", was the gist). I also had the Ginger from the mighty Williams Brothers (yes, them again), and a total wildcard: the organic, fairtrade Little Valley Ginger Pale Ale from Yorkshire, one so loved-up it may as well be wearing sandals and have a wind turbine in the cap.

So how did they fare, and would it be possible to tell the craft beers from the supposedly unpleasant one?

The answer to the second question is overwhelmingly yes. Though all of them poured roughly the same fizzy pale gold, only one of them had zero aroma and a hideous sugariness, plus a metallic saccharine tang and a horrible oxidised staleness. I have never poured a beer down the sink in my life, but Crabbie's brought me close.

Another one I found very bitter, with a green, fresh veg, aroma. It was the most beery of the three, with the ginger almost an afterthought on the end -- with just a small sweet-spice kick of candied ginger as it tails off. Otherwise I found it a bit boring: thin and fizzy. This turned out to be Little Valley: another example of organic and fairtrade badging covering up for a basic lack of beer quality.

That left the Williams, which had a fantastic Canada Dry ginger ale smell and a lovely full body, despite being only 3.8% ABV. There are no hops in here, just added sugar, lemon juice and rind, and ginger. Lots of ginger. It burns in a most wonderful way, and the flavour lasts and lasts. It's far and away the best ginger beer I've had and would be a great summer refresher. Do not serve cold. Do not serve over ice. Do not mix in a cocktail or add fruit of any kind. Proper ginger, proper beer, proper craft.