#Beerbods Week 1: Yellowhammer (Black Isle)
There’s a lovely line in the letter that accompanies the first case of beers from BeerBods: “I’ve been trying to drink better beer for a few years now. It’s been great, but a bit lonely”. It’s an unassuming start to the head-slappingly obvious-once-you-hear-it idea of taking the shared experience of a book club and applying it to beer, but it rings very true for me. I made a conscious decision a couple of years ago to to re-evaluate the quality/quantity balance of things I buy, to buy better (which might mean more expensive) but fewer, and booze is one of the things where I’ve really tried to make a point of this.
The deal’s pretty simple. You pay £3 a week, and every 12 weeks you get a case of 12 beers. An email tells you which one to drink each week, and you are encouraged to share your thoughts on the Beerbods website and on Twitter. This week was the first week, and the selected beer is Yellowhammer, from the Black Isle Brewery near Inverness.
It’s a perfect first beer for me, because I’ve been drinking a lot of these summery, citrusy beers over the last few months, maybe partly to try and convince myself that it is summer really rain what rain? The pub round the corner has Purity’s Pure Gold, the Pub a bit further around the corner has Everard’s Sunchaser, and my beer discovery of the summer was Purple Moose Brewery’s Snowdonia Ale, which tastes every bit as good in my garden in the Midlands as it does at the end of an 8-mile wade through Welsh countryside.
So yes, it’s straw-coloured and citrusy; hoppy but not overly, mouth-dryingly, so. It’s refreshing while actually tasting of something, a proper alternative to expensive but not-that-good-really premium lagers on those days when the sun does actually deign to pay us a visit. I wish I had another bottle…