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…