Heather Ales Grozet

Brewed by Williams Brothers (Heather Ales)
Style: Traditional Ale
Alloa, Central, Scotland

Man, you have to be a druid to like this crap! Whew. I mean really traditional ales are sweet and all but dude this tastes like ogre piss. Pours a really pale yellow. Like a wheat should. Cloudy and dense. Head dies off. Nose smells like a nature preserve. Fruity, slightly citrusy, clovelike and a tinge of grass. Flavors reflect this concentrating on the cloves and the wheat. Malt profile is excellent. though dominated by the grozet flavors if that’s what I’m tasting. Not great G-rat

Yellow, no head. Fruity aroma with some syrup. Flavor brings grapefruit and citrus. Yeasty finish.

Bottle, dated "Best Before Oct. 2000." Another cellared bottle from my stash, so I’ll try and compensate for its age: Pours a dark murkish brown with a thin head. There is a nice berry smell. The taste shows a slight amount of oxidation, and a malt character that has deepend. Berry taste is slightly too sweet for gooseberries, but then it becomes more tart toward the finish. Any hop character is severly diminished, but I could have thought there were other bittering agents at work. It has also gotten a little mediciny over the years. Interesting, and I’d say it’s aged out pretty well.

Bottled (BB 08/2004)
Hazy light yellow. Very small white head. Sour, berry, yeasty, black currant aroma. Quite light, a bit sahti-like notes and witbier-like palate (some wheat flavor).

Aug 2002: Bottle: A very modern ale despite the ancient Celtic connection. The William brothers aim for complexity and originality. With the mix of wheat and barley this leans towards a weiss, but the gooseberry fruit pulls it into another direction. Quite spicy with corriander notes. The pine-flower backtaste is interesting, but detracts from the whole, bringing this down a little. It seems almost as if the brothers have tried a little too hard. Quite a challenging brew. Quite an interesting brew. But not neccesarily an immediately pleasant brew. I would be willing to try this again to get used to it, but the lavoratory pine-block puts me off. [2.6]
Aug 2004: Bottle - BBE Dec 2003. Yes. This beer is stale. I had a bottle hidden away in a box un-noticed, unwanted, unloved. To be honest I had picked it up now and again, but kept putting it back in preference for something else - you know - something more ... drinkable. Now, I don’t know if the version I had two years ago had hops or not, but this baby sure has got them - and they are stale and cardboardy. That’s what made me look at the BBE date - the gentle whiff of stale hops. The citric notes have mellowed into a biscuit nature. There’s banana and other flavours, with gooseberries coming through in the finish. But the best way of describing this would be like eating old, soft fig biscuits washed down with cold lemon tea. For a stale beer this is not bad. [2.7]

Yellow, no head. Aroma from sweet tar, like those pastilles tasting tar. Flavor is pretty much the same, with some floral touches.

Bottled. Hazy amber with a short head. Fruity, medical tar-aroma and flavour. Sweet with a late bitterness. Reminds me of the tar-candy you could buy on the ferries to Finland.

Straw yellow colored, hazy, with good dense head. Amazing fruity medicinal aroma. Palate is herbal with good tone of gooseberries. The taste I could not compare to any of my previous beers. A legend.