4.9

Appearance - 4 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 5 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 4.5

Bottle at home in London - picked up at the Lab. Opens with a loud and lasting hiss, and with the cap off it immediately starts to rise out of the bottle. The excessive effervescence within the bottles disturbs all the yeast, which, when the beer is poured, make themselves known as the float mindlessly about. The beer is murky, burnished red-gold, with a billowing mild tan head. There are a lot of hops present in the aroma: earthy, a little dirty, certainly piney and grassy. The beer is light to medium sweet, keenly oily and resinous, with a bit too much piney and grassy bitterness, some toasted grains, earth, orange peel. Light to medium bodied with out of control carbonation. Heavy and resinous on the finish - it’s like chewing on a raw hop flower, and it leaves your mouth with that lingering, sticky feeling that anyone who has ever tried raw hops would recognise but, perhaps, not particularly relish. Beyond that, there’s more toasted grain, earth, ripening citrus fruits, some flinty minerals. The aftertaste is oily grass and pine. The flaws in this beer are numerous; although, perversely, the over-abundance of carbonation probably helps to inhibit the intensity and rawness of the hops. But still, two wrongs don’t make a right, and this is not a beer of which I would want to drink a lot.