The Ginger Kid
Harcourt Valley Brewing Company

 

Format: standard brown 330mL bottle with a pretty funky indy-looking label. Decent-looking, and I'm looking forward to the 8%

Appearance: a fairly flat and lifeless pour, with minimal head that scatters quickly. The body is light in colour with some murkiness, which is a bit of a worry.

Aroma: there's definitely a load of ginger there, but it smells kind of funky. Not particularly appealing.

Taste: holy good God in his holy hibbin. A ghastly funk that doesn't taste so much like ginger as… I don't know what. A mouth full of arse. The worst ginger beer I have ever tasted.

Aftertaste: the taste couldn't leave fast enough, but the pungence lasted a good long while. Huzzah.

Mouth feel: somehow the feel manages to be very flat, but with an awkward, spritzy bubbliness over the top to carry some metallic flavours and that awful funk flavour. Impressive they have managed to get it so wrong.

Overall: well that was an experience. After the first mouth full, I tried to choke down a couple of sips in the hopes that the flavour just took a bit to get used to. Ended up pouring about 80% of it out. Without any shadow of doubt the worst ginger beer I have ever had, and that is up against some stiff competition. Add to that a price of AU$76 for a case of 24 x 330mL bottles, and this is one I will steer clear of. I assume that since it is from Harcourt Valley it is yet another vineyard that has made the leap into brewing - their first (and often subsequent) forays into the beer world end up being this far from the mark.

330ml. 4.5%. Pale, cloudy, yellowish in colour, light carbonation, ginger and honey aroma, ginger and yeast flavours, tastes like BEER not juice. nice!

330ml bottle, with a depiction of the titular imp holding a relatively large hunk of ginger root, in such a way that it appears to be a swaddled infant.

This beer pours a cloudy pale white, um, 'colour', with a teeming tower of plainly fizzy off-white head, which blows off in mere moments, leaving nil in terms of lace.

It smells of acrid, nosehair-tingling fresh spicy ginger root, candi sugar, and a generic earthy bitterness, I think. The taste is more of the same, my upper palate burning at the fiery ginger spiciness assaulting it, with some stunned light sugary notes, and a suggestion of dry alcohol, but it's pretty hard to tell.

The carbonation is very soda-like, from the opening salvo through to the crackling bubbles on the tongue, the body an adequate medium weight, I suppose, the sugary essence providing the necessary support, but smoothness is patently out of the question. It finishes dry, dry, dry, the ginger spice maintaining its overbearing siege of my better senses.

Yeeesh, well, I guess we beer snobs have got what's been coming to us around here, when complaining that Royal Jamaican is the only 'really' gingery beer available, and sparingly at that. Crikey, this is gingery, I think Imma gonna go check to see if my auburn locks have been thus affected. At any rate, methinks we should generally keep winemakers away from the brewing process.