Tuesday 22 March 2011

Quantock Brewery 'White Hind'

After enjoying the Coniston and Everards bitters recently I thought I would start with a bitter, from the bottles kindly sent to me by Rob at the Quantock Brewery , based in Somerset.
White Hind is a 4.5% abv 500ml bottle conditioned beer, its name taken from a local white hind that was eventually killed, apparently with its head being found in a stream but now adorns a village hall wall.
Lovely. Coincidentally, so is the bitter.

(Bigger picture here)
A lovely auburn brown colour, it had a small white head that left a little lacing. Aroma was a biscuity malt, with also a sharpish hop character. These both followed through in its taste, quite a punchy sharp bitterness, bracing but fresh, and the fruity sweet malt flavour stopping the dry bitterness from running away in your mouth.Everything you expect from a good bitter.

I must admit i was concerned with reviewing my first 'free' beer, what if i didn't like it?, what if it was poorly conditioned?
I'm always aiming to be honest with all beers i review, bought or gifts/free, but still there's still an element of apprehension, human nature i suppose, or is it British culture saying nice things when you don't want to hurt someone or appear ungrateful.
Thankfully neither of those eventualities occurred, i liked this beer, and i now can relax a bit more, looking forward to the others from their range.
You can buy Quantock beers from local farmers markets, or from myBrewerytap, or West Country Ales.

2 comments:

  1. Nice review, I've not baron rated any Quantock beers yet so it was nice to read about it.

    Rule #1 regarding reviewing free stuff - you must be completely honest.

    We broke this rule early on due to a very generous brewery and ended up giving the beers slightly higher scores than we probably should have. The result? Not only did we feel that we had over sold the beers, we got lots of feedback from others who had tried it and didn't think as favourably as we did.

    Since that time we have promised that we will not give a favourable score to any beer regardless of where it came from, or how 'special' it is.

    Honesty is king!

    We have also learnt that a low scoring review with information about why we didn't like it is valuable to some breweries so if it's bad - say so (and why).

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  2. Thanks for the advice, always appreciated.

    ReplyDelete