Wednesday, 15 December 2010

Day Nineteen, Beer Nineteen - Hambleton's "Stud"

Today's Beer




Name – Stud

Brewer – Hambleton Ales

Classification – Bitter

Strength – 4.3%



Verdict - At A Glance

On the eye – For it's taste, surprisingly light and golden.

On the nose – Sweet malts suggest treacle pudding. Wonderful undertones of chip shop vinegar.

On the tongue – A two stage assault on the senses that can leave you embarrassing yourself. (See below...)

On the subject – Going from strength to strength, this firm's modest beginnings are being cast aside by an increasingly hungry market dominance.

On the market – As implied. Growing. Fast. Other examples of their beers may be easier to find. Got this sent from BeerRitz.

On the whole7.5/10



Full Review

When it tries hard enough, beer can make you sing.

It can also make you dance, chat up good looking strangers, and inspire you tell the bosses wife what you really think of her husband.

In other words, beer is not always inclined to make you look good in the eyes of others.

Tonight, a certain beer made me look and sound ridiculous in a way that made me very grateful that I was temporarily on my own.

Hambleton's Stud made me moan.

The moan was, for want of a better description, the sound of human delight.

I didn't actually intend to make the sound, but as I have said, a beer in the right mood can cause beer-loving folk to break into song – and this beer got very close to that by coaxing out of me a sustained pleasure-induced drone.

Despite the emptiness of the room, I was embarrassed.

But my shame was short lived because, quite simply, this drink was just too excellent for me to care about such trivial things as my own reputation for very long.

The first mouthful of it (the principal cause of my impromptu oral outburst) consisted of a two-stage experience that I would have to class as 'unforgettable.'

Taken in isolation, these two stages would each result in a well reviewed beer, but together...well, they made me moan.

Basically, what happens when you drink this beer is this... 

A hop tsunami wreaks blissful havoc throughout your mouth before, after a significant hiatus, the most aggressive thwack of malt that I can recall from any beer appears out of nowhere, causing the aforementioned sustained guttural utterance to begin in earnest.

In other words - that's when it makes you moan.

Add to the mix the delightfully light yet robust body of the drink, and you have a beer that is both heartily satisfying and yet more than ready to quench the mightiest of thirsts.

A delight. That's about all I can say.

Half an hour ago, my embarrassing moan eloquently described what a thousand of my words couldn't possibly improve upon.

I'm just enormously relieved that it was an eloquent sound which nobody heard.



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