難得嚐到幾乎是英國版的Bud… 完全地索然無味！虧它還用了好麥芽、三種酒花、還有巧克力… 或是：酒標貼錯了嗎？

Wooden Hand, Cornish Gribben, 4.1%abv. (English Bitter)

Coming in a 500ml brown glass bottle, BB 09/2013, served cool in a straight imperial pint glass. Note: the back label suggests the ingredients include “chocolate”(!) and sugar in addition to Maris Otter palt malt and Challenger, Fuggles and Goldings hops.

3.5/5 Appearance: pours a slightly translucent dark amber hue, coming with a thin layer of off-white beer head to last, on top of rather fine carbonation.

2.5/5 Smell: on the nose, the initial impression is “sickly sweet”… showing notes of burned cane sugar, sweet orangey-citrus, a touch of brown-sugar mixed ginger tea, and boiled sweet root veggies… Not pleasant, to say the least.

2/5 Taste: thin bodied and rather spritzy, the taste feels as if it was filtered multiple times to reach a state where it’s almost clean (or bland!) and void of flavours; given a very very close observation, a rather low-profiled malty theme struggles to get through, accompanied by random acidity likely from the malts & yeasts and followed by a simplistic, herbally bitter finish where, again, no particular hop aroma or taste seems to be retained.

2/5 Mouthfeel & 2/5 Overall: the mouthfeel is watery-thin and unnecessarily spritzy, weak-bodied, and lacking flavours everywhere. All in all a beer I very much will avoid by all means in the future… (how can it be so bland, I still don’t understand, given such a colourful ingredient profile aforementioned?!)

--Yau (16/05/2013)