Black Diamond Amber Ale

 

Black Diamond Amber

It’s inevitable that, from time to time my perusal of American beers leads me back to English ale styles and ingredients. Never one to ignore stuff from the land of my birth, the description of this ale as being styled after “traditional British Special Bitter”, I could hardly resist using picking up a six-pack for a quick spin.

 

Generally, the English beer drinker is faced with three broad categories: Bitter, Lager and Other (generally darker stuff from Brown Ale through Mild and on to Stout). Given that at the age of eighteen I was weaned onto Bitter, it’s the beer that I still use as the baseline for many of my comparisons.

This ale is pretty close to a Bitter, as it should be, given that the brewers say “…we use the finest English Pale and Crystal malts…[and] several varieties of British Noble hops added at various stages of the brew. I would love to try it on tap rather than from a bottle, as I’d generally rather have my brews unsullied by too much carbonation. My preference is still the romantic one of a beer pulled from the cask by an old-fashioned beer engine, and preferably in the dingy decor of the pubs of my distant youth.

I wasn’t entirely disappointed by this one; it’s the right colour, it smells right and it’s clearly beer. So for the full skinny, read on…I poured the first straight from the ‘fridge, and of course the first thing I noticed was the colour – a clear amber almost identical to the beers of my youth. The head formed quickly and well, but soon decayed into lacy flotsam. Next up, the scent, which had both malt and citrus (dare I say “limey”?) on the plus side, but faintly metallic on the negative.

For the taste, there was the same malt-lime combination, but with the slightly acid bitterness of the hops. It’s quite dry and bitter, almost sour. What’s left after this first impression is a faintly nutty flavour, with hints of toffee, both of which come to the fore as the liquor warms a little. At close to room temperature, they are more pronounced, and when I opened another bottle that I’d left out of the ‘fridge for fifteen minutes or so, they were there from the outset. The mouthfeel was on the thin side, the body slightly weak, and but it left an acerbic aftertaste, and again, a metallic edge.

Despite the faint metallic tang, I quite enjoyed it, and would drink it again, though not on its own – it would probably be a good beer to drink on a lunchtime, over a ploughman’s lunch, with a nice sharp cheese and some Branston Pickle. Rating? I think a C+ fits it when chilled, but at cellar temperature, it comes out as a sweeter, rounder brew.