My New Blog

I love stouts and porters, but not Guinness. But then again, the Guinness you get in bars is nothing like any stout you’d get from a real ale brewer. Like the creamflow bitters, it has nitrogen added (to give it the creamflow), and it just tastes….meh. Newky brown disagrees with me as much as Guinness does with you. It’s the most horrendous example of a brown ale, and almost put me off the style entirely.

Probably because of what I grew up drinking, some of my favourite beers are UK ales brewed with NZ hop varieties, giving me flavours of the beers of both countries. Shepherd Neame makes some really nice beers using NZ hops, and one of them tastes very similar to one of my favourite NZ beers.

But really, I am no great connoisseur. I like loads of different beers from loads of different breweries across the country. So long as they don’t experiment too much with flavour (I don’t need a hazy ipa flavoured with guava, thank you very much), I tend to find some degree of enjoyment. What I do find frustrating, is when one brewery is bought up by another. My most local big brewer, Greene King, is the worst for this. As much as they might claim that the taste is the same, it never is. GK make some alright beers, and some of the beers they brew under the name of the breweries they’ve taken over aren’t too dissimilar - but there are some beers I really enjoyed before they became GK, that really don’t taste the same at all now.

I love stouts and porters, but not Guinness. But then again, the Guinness you get in bars is nothing like any stout you’d get from a real ale brewer. Like the creamflow bitters, it has nitrogen added (to give it the creamflow), and it just tastes….meh. Newky brown disagrees with me as much as Guinness does with you. It’s the most horrendous example of a brown ale, and almost put me off the style entirely.

Probably because of what I grew up drinking, some of my favourite beers are UK ales brewed with NZ hop varieties, giving me flavours of the beers of both countries. Shepherd Neame makes some really nice beers using NZ hops, and one of them tastes very similar to one of my favourite NZ beers.

But really, I am no great connoisseur. I like loads of different beers from loads of different breweries across the country. So long as they don’t experiment too much with flavour (I don’t need a hazy ipa flavoured with guava, thank you very much), I tend to find some degree of enjoyment. What I do find frustrating, is when one brewery is bought up by another. My most local big brewer, Greene King, is the worst for this. As much as they might claim that the taste is the same, it never is. GK make some alright beers, and some of the beers they brew under the name of the breweries they’ve taken over aren’t too dissimilar - but there are some beers I really enjoyed before they became GK, that really don’t taste the same at all now.

You’d quite possibly like some more UK-style beers. Definitely a lot of US brewers tend to focus on the hops and bitterness, and there are a fair few beers out there measuring at least 11 on a scale of 1-10.

But regardless of where you are drinking, there is an enormous difference in flavour profiles both between the various types of beer, and even within them. That difference is even greater when seen between geographic regions. Generally speaking, for example, I don’t particularly like UK brown ales, but I almost always love Belgian brown ales.