The Shep effect

Shepherd Neame time again. I'd actually been holding off on boring you with yet another one of these, planning to build up a few more bottles and publish in one big batch. That would have been merciful. I'd had these two in sensory deprivation since March, but no new ones have arrived since, and then Thom wrote about how one of them was quite drinkable. That piqued my curiosity enough for me to fetch them into the light. So here they are:

Up and Under was produced for the Six Nations. It's a brown bitter, 4% ABV as all these Shep specials are. The aroma was slightly lightstruck, but not too bad. On the taste we're in very familiar territory: there's a sugary sweetness I've come to associate with this series, and a rising wateriness at the end. The milk chocolate malt aspect I've definitely met before, in a more terrifying aspect, in the woeful Tapping the Admiral. Here it's manageable. The slightly whiffy hops float about the aftertaste as well, creating a bit of a bum note, but not a jarring one. On balance, if there was nothing else in the pub, I think I could drink a couple of pints of this and not feel too hard done by, though I won't go so far as to say my €1.49 in Lidl was well spent.


On to the Double Stout, then. Drinking through the very impressive head I can see where Thom was getting the roast and vanilla notes from, I got quite a bit of caramel as well, with a long bitter finish in place of the dryness I was expecting. The roast is more in the rich and meaty category than burnt and grainy. It's nearly a very good beer and great value for money. Except... through it all I'm still getting that niggling wateriness and odd flashes of skunk. I'd be interested to find out if I could identify this as a Shepherd Neame stout in a blind tasting, but I feel I could. So while it may be dolled up as a stout -- trying a bit too hard with the paddywhackery label, may I add -- deep down this is just another one of those Shepherd Neame ales that Lidl sells.

With two months of quiet, could this be the end of the Brewmaster's Choice series at Lidl? A rest would be nice.

Cheap Shep set sesh

For as long as Lidl keep bringing out cheap Shepherd Neame specials, I'll keep buying them. Some day they'll produce something as good as Bishop's Finger or 1698. But that day is yet to come. There were three in the latest round, labelled as the "Master Brewer's Choice", all 4% ABV and on sale for the totally-worth-a-punt sum of €1.49 each.

The most promising of the three was called Tapping the Admiral but the anticipation was short-lived: when the cap came off there wafted out an unmerciful stench of lightstruck hops. Open a window and don't nobody smoke: something's crawled into this beer and died. Of dysentry. Ignoring the stink, the beer is an attractive gold colour, but that's it's best feature. Amazingly there's no trace of those pungent hops in the flavour. Instead there's a woeful sickly cheap-chocolate sweetness. This is apparently supposed to evoke brandy, but offers no heat, no wood and no fruit; just a box of Milk Tray from three Christmases ago you found at the back of a cupboard. Avoid.

Autumn Blaze was next. It looks the part, all auburn and russet and the other adjectives from that shelf in the hair dye section. There's no assault on the olfactory nerve, though up close it has a sort of maple syrup woody stickiness. Nothing really jumps out in the flavour: a little bit of roastiness but there's nothing more than fizzy water behind it. Put it on cask to bring out the malt more and this would perform adequately as a workhouse brown bitter. As-is it's perfectly drinkable, but so laid back flavourwise as to be comatose. Your granddad will like it.

Palest of the lot is 4-4-2, with its daft claim to use ten different hop varieties. Using up leftovers, were we? This made its first appearance during the World Cup and my first impressions on tasting it is that they've gone straight for the lager-swilling demographic. Rather than the cascade (see what I did there?) of multitudinous hop flavours it has a vaguely grassy Germanic feel to it. Beneath that there's slight toasty malt and lots of fizz. If the aim was to produce a clone of Beck's or Carlsberg then they've done a bang-up job. But as a tasty pale ale it's a poor show.

And there you have it: two beers that are so-so in their own way and one absolute (literal) stinker. In all honestly I can't say if there's better beer going for €1.50 a half litre in Dublin. Maybe the Franziskaner next to it in Lidl. I'm actually slightly intrigued as to what the Shep-Lidl Alliance is going to throw at us next. I dub this game "Kentish Roulette".