CAMRA Beer Styles Training

This afternoon Dawn and I joined a Zoom training session in CAMRA Beer Styles.

This was the listing.

I had bought the 5 beers and set up my laptop in the kitchen to screencast to the TV there so we could drink the beers at the kitchen table.

Here are the 5 beers.

The session lasted about 2 hours and we learnt how to assess a beer, noting its characteristics under the headings of appearance, aroma, taste and aftertaste, and then placing it in a beer style category. The lager was definitely a "Speciality Beer - Differently Produced (Different Yeats), and the Spitfire a session bitter. But it was a surprise that, although English, the Proper Job turns out to be a New World IPA because it uses the same hops as such American beers. The Ruby Hobgoblin was difficult to classify - I and several others had it as an old ale, the the official CAMRA classification is as a, surprise surprise - a Red Ale. My choice of porter turned out to be an archetypical Strong Porter.

Great fun! And now we have 5 1/2 bottles of beer left to drink over the next couple of days.