Ale, Beer, Stout appreciation

Brutally easy to drink for 10%!

This is pretty good £1.59 Lidl. Williams Bros Mocha Stout.

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Those two made up about half of my Xmas order that never arrived from BIAB :(

How are Pressure Drop ‘rated’ generally? Everything I’ve ever had from them has been good or great but never seen any buzz round them like other breweries.

Yeah they are always pretty solid, bit like Kernel really. Can always rely on them but they're not shouty about themselves.

Gutted, real shame they went under, always had great service from them :(

They get my vote. I just see less of their stuff than others perhaps.

Great brewery. To me they felt a bit ahead of the curve when they first released pale fire, then stayed solid but got a bit lost amongst much of the stuff that came after them and then really jumped back up in my estimations around the time they opened The Experiment and are a definite go-to now

My favourite Belgian.

Which is a good thing.... ?

(it is in my house) :)

It was super drinkable and was like a sour-beer tease. It was nice, but I also couldn't quite put my finger on what it was .... I also got their eldeflower one from this series that I have yet to have.

It definitely made me pick up one of the new Track sours when I passed my local beer shop .. today's haul:

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Grabbed a can of Verdant's Putty from my local shop yesterday and cracked it last night. Tried really hard to be objective and not hate it because of the hype. But it's just a nice DIPA, thick and full bodied, nice juicy taste but that's it. It still suffers from that cloying sugary build up by the end of the can that every DIPA I can remember has. A lovely beer but the hype and the price (2 for £12.50 where i got it from, but some places are charging £8 a can) is not justified, not even close IMO. Saturated in Motueka from Deya, 8% and £4.50 a can in the same shop, is a better beer.

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The only way is up from 8% so I decided it was time to open this bottle from my last trip to Belgium in 2017. So, so good!

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So, based on last night's sampling...

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ha!

I didn't like that one at all. My girlfriend (who doesn't like beer) really liked it.

My order from Brew by Numbers seems to have gone missing and they've now sold out of that variety pack.

However, when I emailed them they said I could make up a pack from their current range of beers which seems fair enough. Now just waiting for that to arrive.

Abt 12 is the OG recipe for Westvleteren 12 who contracted out their brewing to St Bernadus for the end of the war til 1992 then changed up the brew when it came back in house. I did not enjoy Westy half as much as I love Abt 12

I should've got some nice beers last night like I wanted. Instead I bought a bottle of cheap bourbon and woke up on the bed fully clothed. Fucksake.

I think Verdant high ABV beers are rough as fuck. They have too much alcohol burn for me and the pricing is out of hand.

I do like them but the prices are wild.

The pricing is not unrealistic.

What is your local shop and where is this in the UK?

As based on the trade price (I do some beer sales through work) and taking into account VAT they are making fuck all on either of those beers.

Verdant are selling Putty at £6.35 themselves (at the Experiment), the shops that are selling it at £8 are still making less than 40% margin based on the trade price (from a distributor).

Small independent businesses cannot survive on tiny margins.

The margins are neither here nor there. My point is that is a wildly over-hyped beer that's no better than any other DIPA that Verdant or anyone else makes. When you compare it to the Deya beer I mentioned it's just not as nice in my opinion, so the fact that it's £2 a can more expensive makes for an underwhelming experience rather than a price scandal. If they're selling out I'm genuinely happy about that as a supporter of independent businesses and a Cornishman myself. I'm just baffled by the hype around what is just another DIPA.

I did not know that - interesting! As I'm sure I've said before, much as I think Westvleteren is a great beer, its supposed singular status is down to scarcity and hype; IMO pretty much all the Belgian Trappist breweries make equally good beer.

Also