Blogging on Location: Roosters

I remember the first time I tried this beer. It was a cold day in the shop, we had just taken our deliveries and Tom produced a test tube sort of item out of his bag with some ominous looking yellow liquid inside. "You have to try this!" was his proclaim, to which I was rather skeptical, but after a whiff of the aroma It wasn't long before the thing was finished. A few weeks later, and the beer was bottled. So many hops were used in the production that not that much beer ever did make it to the glasses, it was mainly eaten up and soaked into those little delicious green bastards. After a time when all the beer had gone, and everyone who had tried it had stopped asking Tom when he was going to make some more, the thought's died down a little about the lust for making crazily hopped beers which were never going to be viable for consumer release.

How times they do change...

Tom has once again showed his generosity by giving me one of these individually numbered (70 in total?) bottles from his new place of work Roosters Brewery. I know the recipie has been a little tweaked to make it slightly more commercially viable, but I have no doubts that it will be impressive before I even open it.

So tonight I'm on location. Not at Roosters mind, but in the back of Beer Ritz, ready to share this with my colleague Ben Corkhill, who writes Hails 'n' Ales, to pass on a little of the generosity I was given. - Because as we all know, it's nice to share something nice!

Here's what we thought:

A beer with a massive floral aroma, mangos and peaches dominate the smell. It's a beer that tastes about 3% even though it's 6.1% and is so refreshing it's hard to put it down. Deliciously fruity with a really pleasing bitter sweet body. Not one dimensional at all considering it only contains 1 hop - Citra. Really complex but surprising simple to drink, really easy going, it ticks all my bases for what I thought it would be.

Over to Ben:

This is a great beer and not too dissimilar to one of my favourites, the Sierra Nevada Souhern Hemisphere Harvest, but with more of a lingering bitter quality. The aroma literally had my mouth watering, and a few swirls down the glass bring out that fruitiness again and again. I was surprised when Ghostie told me it was single hopped due to its complexity. Deceptively drinkable - well done lads! 

It's really interesting, I still remember the first Assassin, and whislt this one is different it still has an incredible impact, and seems to have aquired a bit of the Roosters spirit of flavour along the way.