So the piercing-blue eyes of a fella stare me down from behind the decapitated heads of two horses. Sometimes the bottle label grabs you and pulls you right in, other times it doesn't.
Un-Hung hero is a 5% pale ale that's brewed with Cascade and Northdown hops. The bottle text warns off those that like their beer fizzy and bland; ironic really because this is one of the most carbonated bottled beers I think I've ever drunk. The head is billowy and pillowy in the White Shield mould and sticks around throughout.
The aroma is great, it screams CASCADE at the top of its lungs, lots of really fresh hop aroma, grapefruit pith and peel and freshly squeezed juice. It's one of those aromas that you don't focus on long because it makes you just want to drink the beer.
But that's where the positives kinda end for me. The taste is dominated by a fruity sweetness that moves into green apple - a sure fire sign of acetaldehyde. Usually formed through oxidation or an incomplete fermentation, acetaldehyde is a compound that's almost always unwanted in beer. Imagine biting into a really crisp, cold, fresh green apple; that's the exact flavour I'm tasting here and that's the flavour of acetaldehyde.
Right in the background there's a husky, cereally, biscuit flavour that's coming from the grain. It's nice, but not enough to turn this bottle around.
Faults like this in a beer can be limited to a bottle or a batch. Just because the bottle I got wasn't perfect, doesn't mean the others were the same. How was yours?
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