TLA VVG

There's a certain daftness about brewers' fondness for three letter acronym names, particularly when they're used to make a beer seem more English than it actually is, as in Sierra Nevada ESB or Porterhouse TSB. Nothing fake about Brakspear EPA, however, apart from the fact that there's no actual Brakspear brewery any more and it's all made at the Refresh plant in Witney, but none of that matters: it's made in England and, far more importantly, tastes English.

In fact, to me, it's a perfect example of my favourite kind of English bitter. There's a touch of fresh floral aroma and a tannic bitterness on top of a full, almost greasy, body. It's very simple and completely unfussy, but far from the tasteless mediocrity that so many English brewers pass off as bitter.

Filtered, pasteurised and containing who-knows-what: yes, probably. But still the beer for me.

And that's your lot until I come back from Copenhagen, where the European Beer Festival kicks off tomorrow afternoon. Three days of beer in 10cl measures is likely to keep me in posts for a while.

Don't screw up

Every time I approach a bottle of Sierra Nevada beer, I smile. "Fresh seal cap" it says, "use bottle opener". As opposed to what? Yes I'm aware that American beers frequently have twist-off crown caps. I even remember the days when our Miller Genuine Draft came direct from Milwaukee in such bottles, before Beamish & Crawford acquired the rights to make it in Cork. But a childish sense of glee derives from images of lazy gits shredding their fingers trying to screw off the cap from a bottle of Beer For Grown-Ups.

Schadenfreude aside, this evening's beer is Sierra Nevada ESB: yet another new arrival from the US. The first hiss from the cap gave me a very American jet of hops aroma. The pour also produced a satisfying rich orange coloured ale, leading me to expect the same sort of hoppy surprise I got from the brewery's Anniversary Ale.

Denied! The first sip left no doubt that this is a malt-driven beer. The hops are a mix of English and US varieties, but I'm pretty sure that the former are in the ascendancy, imparting dryness rather than real bitterness. The malt flavour adds candy notes which come close to cancelling the hops out. The sum total of all this is really not very much, and I see no excuse for a hefty 5.9% ABV.

This is the sort of beer which would work well by the pint, cask conditioned, with a little over half the alcohol. As an imported baby bottle, proper cap notwithstanding, it's just not working for me.