I have created purest Greene.....

....King IPA! Batch #2 of my homebrew was an IPA based on a recipe from John Palmer's How To Brew book. I modified the recipe slightly, but it was fairly close. The beer was bottled in January and over the last few weeks I've sampled a few bottles. The more of it I taste, the more it reminds me of Greene King IPA, a beer which is legendary amongst British real ale drinkers, and not for good reasons. A few years back it won an award at the CAMRA Champion Beer of Britain awards, which was met with a stunned silence followed by howls of derision.

As beers go, it's not a particularly bad one. It just isn't very good. The thing that sticks out for me (and where my homebrew is reminiscent) is a musty old-hops character to it. I'm not sure how I've managed to recreate this in my homebrew, but I'll certainly be trying not to do it again. Batch #2 is otherwise not too bad to my tastes, a reasonable amount of fruit with good bitterness. I'll be trying again before too long.

(Apologies to Lord Percy Percy of Blackadder the Second for mangling his excellent line for the title of this post!)