The Speakeasy
Hobsons Brewery in Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire, England 🏴
Pale Ale - American Style / APA Special|
Score
6.84
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Festival at the Edge, commonly known as FatE, is the oldest storytelling festival in England, which has a proud heritage of bringing together the finest traditional storytelling, music, workshops and much more from these shores and beyond. Thank you for supporting this unique festival and for being part of our story.
Enjoy the beer brewed by Hobsons Brewery. A pale ale full of hop flavour. Brewed with Columbus and Lubelski hops to give complex flavour of floral and citrus notes.
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Alengrin (11609) reviewed The Speakeasy from Hobsons Brewery 2 years ago
Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7.5 | Flavor - 7.5 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7
Hoppy pale ale by Hobsons in Shropshire southwest of Birmingham, apparently a one-off created for a local storytelling festival - many thanks to my girlfriend Goedele for bringing this bottle over from England, not by coincidence as her sister Veerle is indeed a professional storyteller. Medium thick, tooth-like lacing, egg-white, tiny-bubbled, partially breaking but generally stable head; crystal clear warm yellow-golden robe with thin strings of disparate sparkling rising up throughout the beer. Peculiar, notably herbaceous aroma of spicy rye bread (though containing wheat rather than rye), pine resin (Columbus!), lavender oil (very strong Lubelski hops indeed!), cheese spread, spruce tips, bee wax, raw quince, margarine, juniper berries, parsley, yellow grapefruit peel, tonic water, hints of freshly cut hogweed, unripe apricot, moist white pepper, thyme. Clean, dryish onset, some subdued fruitiness as in hard pear or unripe peach but hardly any sweetness at all, minerally carbonation (a bit stingy at first), slick and smooth, almost a bit buttery mouthfeel; slender white-bready and grainy malt backbone soon aromatized by very piney (Columbus) and dried lavender-like (Lubelski) hops, with further accents of parsley, raw parsnip, dried ginger and thyme completing the picture, providing a long, resinous bitterness which becomes a bit rooty in the end, yet manages to remain in balance with the 'raw' graininess of the malts. Feels like a piney version of a classic English style golden ale rather than an APA - but I guess the APA moniker, implying the use of New World hops, is broad enough to accommodate even this unusual interpretation. Both hop varieties are very outspoken and very clear here, exhibiting their respective features in a very pure and pronounced way, undisturbed by any malt or ester frivolity. Clean, ultimately simple but to the point and technically correct, quenching and pleasant to drink, but you will really have to like pine resin and lavender effects.