Garlic Beer – The Verdict
Well, I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Rich from The Beer Cast told me it was “truly awful“. Graeme said it was: “an awful taste experience“. But seeing as I was having a big bowl of spicy, garlic-laden nasi goreng for my dinner last Friday, I thought I’d go ahead and tried the stuff anyway.
I popped the cap and… nothing. Not even a hiss. Flat as a pancake. A whiff of the neck of the bottle sent me reeling before I tentatively came back for a second attempt: pork cooked in cider with a couple of bulbs of crushed garlic (quite possibly elephant garlic) in the cooking liquor. Which actually wasn’t too bad, until I remembered the stuff was presumably supposed to smell like beer instead.
I poured, as carefully as I could. This still resulted glassful of liquid that could only be described as “murky”. I girded my loins, manned-up and took a sip.
An over-powering blast of raw garlic, conveyed by one of the most hideously sweet beverages I’ve ever had the misfortune to sample*. It really was truly, truly awful. ‘Nasty’ might be a good descriptor for it, as well. Likewise ‘disgusting’, ‘revolting’, ‘nauseating’ or any other synonym in the same section of the thesaurus.
After a 20 minute settle, it looked like this:
Yeah, that’s a good 10mm of sediment in the bottom of that glass, with more to come. By this point I’d already moved onto another beer entirely; the whole letting-it-settle thing was purely for experimental purposes. Although yes, I did take another small sip at this point. No, it really didn’t taste any better. Down the sink it went, with half a kettle of boiling water to chase it away.
Slightly ironically, the Garlic Farm’s PR people got in touch last week to offer me a free bottle of the stuff. When I mentioned that the reviews so far weren’t exactly positive, they gamely suggested that it could be used to enhance a beef stew. I’d have to counter-suggest that you use fresh garlic and a decent bottle of stout in your beef stew and leave this stuff for the gimmick-gift-givers to foist on their loved (or not-so loved) ones. Which I’m guessing was rather the point all along? After all, it’s not like there’s going to be a huge repeat market, is there?
In conclusion: not even a fun one to try. And as far as I’m concerned: never again.
