Black Heart brewery in Brighton, Victoria produce an English pale ale, which as they say on the bottle, fine ale crafted by the hand of a surgeon. So this would be good at golf, and patronising then.

The Black Heart brewery is one of the breweries who are using labels on the top and neck of the bottle to indicate the beer inside the bottle, without producing many labels for each beer. Invercargill in NZ is one, and Black Heart brewery is another. I quite like this, and it makes it easy to see which beer is what.

This English ale sits well in the glass. It’s a nice light red ale with a fine head of tightly spaced bubbles. Looking a lot finer than most English pub hand-pulled ales, this sits well and looks really good.

A good English pale ale should have a good hop aroma, and not be too sweet. There is not much aroma to this beer. Well, with my nose anyway. There is a slight hop and malt smell, and it smells slightly sweet with a subtle tang to it.

Tasting this beer, you get a slight sweet taste with some malt to it, so it tastes initially a bit sickly, and not that much like an ale. However, with this sweetness comes a smooth body which does go well, so this beer is easy to drink, of a little too much on the sugary qualities. The middle tastes are that of an acidic tang like that of grapefruit, which is not unpleasant, but just one I would not expect for this type of beer. Finally the bitter hops with grapefruit aftertastes comes through which cleans out the sweet initial tastes to this beer.

Summary. Not unpleasant, but just too sweet for my tastes. A good body, and quite interesting citrus flavours makes for a good beer, but not great.