BROUGHTON BREWERY LTD

 OG1038 ABV 3.9%

10 out of 10!

This beer has a good head and good retention. It is very highly carbonated. Mahogany coloured tinted with red, about 38 CU. NOSE Very slight (Almost none) citrus fruit. PALETTE Hint of crystal malt and a slight sourness, lightly hopped with a smidgen of roast barley. About 22 EBU. Good hop finish. NOTES Very Drinkable. Almost a mild. Ingredients. pale malt with flaked maize and roasted barley. Fuggles and Goldings Hops.

I started by just making a few notes of my first immpressions as I took the first few mouthfulls of a new beer, colour, smell, taste, head and body, etc. I didn’t understand the recognised colour scales, ECU, SRM and er, the other one which no one can ever remember! So I made up my own:-)

DAVES UNIVERSAL BEER COLOUR INDICATOR

I tried to make this as simple as possible, because that is the way I need things to operate. The simple formula is: The light intensity of a standard 100 watt bulb measured in lux divided by the refraction of light measured in SRLI units all multiplied by the colour of the light source in (Colour Rendering Index – C.R.I.) Ra units. Dead easy isn’t it……..

OK… I’m joking. What I really did was imagine a scale ranging from 1 – 100. 1 would be clear and 100 would be totally black. Everything else is then somewhere between these two figures. For example, for Belhaven 80/- I have down 33 colour units which I would describe as a deep copper with a tinge of red type colour. Easy eh?

BITTERNESS UNITS (E.B.U.)

I started by just ‘guesstimating’ roughly how bitter each beer was. I called on my own brewing efforts, where I knew how bitter a beer was, to give me an indication if I was in the correct ball-park.

I then bought a copy of Roger Protz’ ‘REAL ALE ALMANAC’ and compared my figures with the breweries official figures. Well, you could have knocked me over with a dried hop cone. I found that most were within 2 or 3 of the official EBU figures.

Arrogance took over at this point, and I concluded that the figures that didn’t agree with mine were wrong!

THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE NOTES

So there you have it. The science, or total lack of it behind my tasting notes. Take them for what they are supposed to be, just an indication of my impressions of a beer. If you don’t agree with any of my notes then feel free to E-mail me. I can’t change anything because these are my first immpressions but I would be interested to hear your views.