Best Mates Vicar's Daughter

Best Mates Vicar's Daughter [baron rating 1/5] - 3.7% gold ale,fruity yeasty smell, fruity tart yeasty taste,unpleasant tart bitter finish Baron Orm

Listen to what Chris and the Baron have to say about it.

Download flash to hear the audio review

Audio includes a mini-rant against CAMRA and their insistence on bottle conditioned ales being the only 'real ales'.

This was from the summer pack of the superb '52 week beer club' by myBrewerytap.

Join it now and make sure you say the baron made me do it!

Buy Best Mates ales here

myBrewerytap's summer selection of the '52 week beer club'

Chris & I have been a member of myBrewerytap's 52 week beer club since December and so our third quarter's pack arrived a few weeks ago. Due to a 'beer backlog' I've only just found the time to blog about it's contents now, so sorry for the delay!

The box arrived in excellent condition (as always) and the first thing that I noticed was that the box was bigger than previous quarters - it could withstand a missile strike & not disturb the yeast sediment!

Inside there were 13 bottles of ale, some tasting notes and a large bag of Q pork scratchings (award winning ones at that!).

• Acorn Conquest

• Atlantic Gold

• Belvoir Melton Red

• Best Mates Vicar's Daughter

• Cotleigh Barn Owl

• Derventio Emperor's Whim

• Felinfoel Stout

• Hidden Old Sarum

• Oakleaf Hole Hearted

• Ossett Excelsior [baron rating 5/5]

• RCH Pitchfork

• Potton Shambles

• Wold Top Wold Gold

An excellent looking pack full of crisp, hoppy summer ales - a perfect match for the summer pack! I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into these beers over the coming weeks.

If you are not already a member of the "52 week beer club" I would suggest you sign up - just don't forget to say that "the baron made me do it!" ;)

Reviews of the remaining 6 ales of myBrewerytap's 52 Week Beer Club (December pack)

As you may already know,  Chris Routledge & I joined myBrewerytap's 52 Week Beer Club in December last year and received our first quarter's ales a week before Christmas.  We decided to split the tasting of the 13 bottled ales into two sessions, the first of which was at the beginning of January.  On Wednesday last week we decided to try the remaining six bottles.

Here are links to the six ales that we've 'baron rated':

• Best Mates Midsummer Madness [baron rating 1/5 ♫]

• Bitter End Lakeland Golden [baron rating 3/5 ♫]

• Penlon Cardi Bay [baron rating 2/5 ♫]

• Quartz Blonde [baron rating 4/5 ♫]

• Sadler's Thin Ice [baron rating 3/5 ♫]

• Stroud Budding [baron rating 5/5 ♫]

The Stroud Budding was by far the best ale of the night, really nicely balanced, a truly lovely beer. The Best Mates Midsummer Madness was the worst but after hearing another beer blogger's comments on his bottle from the club we feel that the bottle was probably off and not necessarily a fair representation of Best Mates ale.

We recorded some short (1-2 mins) MP3 audio reviews of us discussing the beer a little more than the 140 twitter-friendly limit allows, click each beer review link to find the audio player. 

myBreweryTap's 52 week beer club is well worth the money, at around £1.50 per bottle it's a great way to get to try loads of different ales from small and hard to get breweries - click here to join the club

Best Mates Midsummer Madness

Best Mates Midsummer Madness [baron rating 1/5] - this 3.9% copper ale has a very sweet malt smell,sour fruits taste & a yeasty sweet finish

Listen to what Chris and the Baron have to say about it.

Download flash to hear the audio review

Subscribe in iTunes

Part of the superb '52 week beer club' by myBrewerytap
join it now and make sure you say "the baron made me do it"!

Buy Best Mates ales here

Update (01/02/2010): I now feel that this bottle of Best Mates Midsummer Madness had gone off or was from a bad batch after a similar message from @BeerReviewsAndy. I'm going to leave the score until I get a chance to re-sample the ale...