Yo I said yo. I took this beautiful picture in my studio, I did I did. OK… so… as we have established, the good folks at Sierra Nevada CAN’T MAKE BAD BEER. It’s all good. Mostly great, in fact. BUT… I gots me two little issues with this one. First… Early Spring Beer? ESB… that stands for Extra Special Bitter, man. Always has (er… for as long as that specific beer has been produced and denoted as such) and always will (until the sun collapses into a plasma-consuming white dwarf and then ultimately a dying pulsar and then: Pffffwaaugh! Ghosts! Yeah…). And second… this beer… it tastes a lot… hmm… read on…

OK… it tastes a LOT lot like another beer. A very good beer indeed, but you sort of can’t help comparing it to CLICK HERE, BUDDY! This, the Early Spring Beer… it is delicious, it is wonderful, I recommend it until the cows are all home, warm in their barn with their lattes (cow lattes) and such, but it tastes a LOT like their pale. 3 malted barleys—two role pale, crystal and Maris Otter (I gotta learn more about that’n)—give the beer it’s canvas, if you will, which the palate of hops and alcohol play across. Clocking in at a decent 5.9% ABV, the alcohol braces the floral hops, provided by FIVE DIFFERENT HOP VARIETIES! Damn. That’s some good hopping; no one can take that away from ‘em. M-mm.

I think what I need to do is set one of their ESBs next to one of them Pales and reeeeaaaaally compare. Down n dirty! Like with water and bread to clear the palate and leather pads on my blazer’s elbows et all. And maybe some reading glasses. And nice silk couch and arm-chair set around a mahogany coffee table in the middle of the desert. Just because that would be awesome.

I think that perhaps I have been too harsh in calling these beers quasi-the-same, but they are very similar in their overt hop aroma, hop and malt body with a nice, unfiltered mouthfeel and that lovely, bitter finish. Indeed being similar to a great beer is not even a bad thing… just when they’re by the same folks… at any rate, complexity is afoot!… and maybe without standing these beers side by side I’m just a no-good carpetbagger. Or rather you are. Yeah, you’re the carpetbagger. No land here and no work neither. Dried up in the dust winds of ought-fowah… move along their, glove socks!