Draft: Poured a golden with white head. Aroma was light, maybe hops. Taste was bland, light hops and grain.

Guinness trying to cover the standard pale lager market with this 'double-hopped lager', a tribute to an old hop store building apparently. Off-white, creamy, fairly thick head leaving large amounts of papery lacing over a cristal clear orangey-hued 'old gold' robe with no visible sparkling, darker than average for the intended style. Aroma of hot ironed cloth - in other words, very dominant pasteurisation, sourish grains and chicken food, damp kitchen towel, moist white pepper from your grandma's spice rack, potato peel, plastic, brown soap, new bicycle tyres, dried out bread crumbs and even a vague note of old dry rusk and soggy peanuts. Neutral onset, some sourish and (more pronounced) sweetish graininess, medium carbonation (quite softish for style actually), very slick, supple mouthfeel. Cereally, admittedly very thinly nutty middle - as in soggy breakfast cereals with a minimal dash of soaking wet peanuts thrown in - with that annoying cooked pasteurisation effect persisting all the way through, yet at the same time admittedly less grainy and more 'rounded' than is custom for an industrial pale lager. Ends only very mildly hoppy with vague floral and grassy notes, effectuating a very late, brief and superficial hop bitterness lingering a bit on the tongue's root but standing no chance against this ongoing blandness of cereally malt sweetishness; plastic- and cooked cloth-like accents as well. The aforementioned hoppiness, in all, remains very subtle and fails to lend the finish any body, rendering it thin and watery. Lazy marketing got the better of Guinness once again: this is a very bland, utterly boring pale lager like there are plenty enough around in the entire world, albeit - and I hate to admit it - perhaps a little bit more hop bitterish and a little bit maltier than average for the dreary yet still commercially dominant style it belongs to. Take note, Guinness executives: in a world where people are increasingly turning to 'craft beer', teach your marketeers not to put "Hop House" or anything else with the word "hop" on your label. This only creates confusion and disappointment, because what you present us with here, is a very cheaply made, bland and artificial pale lager - not at all smelling like 'peach' or 'apricot' like you seem to promise your consumers. Shame on you for lying to them on different levels.