Modern Fitzgerald
Checkerspot Brewing Company

From the website:

"Brewed in collaboration with beer historian Maureen O’Prey, this is our recreation of the 1st beer brewed by Baltimore Brewer John Fitzgerald served to HL Mencken on Legalization Day, ending Prohibition. It’s a Brown Ale, triple hopped with Fuggle, East Kent Goldings and Cluster hops and local Dark Cloud pale malt."

So, okay, yeah that it something my curmudgeonly old ass is very interested in trying.

Crowler canned today and drank a few hours later.

Beer pours a dark ruby brown into an old schooner glass, minimal effervescence but a pretty color.

Aroma is an old, old, old school British Brown Ale (back when it wasn't problematic to say "British" instead of "English."). Sweet biscuit malt and very intensely dry nuttiness with some firm pushback from the old world hops.

Tastes very good. It's fairly hard to find actual England-made English browns stateside these days, and even harder to find them fresh. I recall back when you could find, say, Bass (by which I mean the actual beer, not the AB-Inbev abomination currently resting on our shelves), it still suffered from diacetyl nodes. This was in the early 2000's, and I remember reading about descriptions of how English beer tasted to Americans in the 70's and being super jealous. This is roughly how I thought the beer would taste.

Caramel and biscuits up front, moving into an aggressively hoppy middle and finish that might not seem aggressively hoppy to someone who's used to the word "hoppy" solely applying to varieties of American pale ales. There's dryness, then spice, then tang, and then just a wee bit of malt rushing in toward the back to even everything out a bit, leaving behind a pleasantly ashen finish.