Heather Ales Alba

Bottle best before end of June 2004. Just a little late. Poured a clear amber body with a nice little head. Aroma comes off harmless enough. Malty with caramel and nuts, hints of berries, hops and maybe a hint of pine. Also some earth there. Flavor is completely different. If I could envision pine tasting good, this is it! Berry comes through as well, and some hop bitterness near the end giving a bittersweet finish. Far exceeded my expectations after their gooseberry brew. Wonderful.

Hazy amber-orangeish hue, with a shy tan-colored head, with a sweet caramelized malt, pine needles, spicy spruces aromas follow through on a medium-bodied palate with sweet, spicy, nice malty charecter, conifer, spruce and piney notes, leading towards a good malty finish.

Poured it too cold, let it reach room temperature and aromas/ flavors were much more present. Loved the sweet aroma, very pungent. Sticky feeling in mouth. Never had pine, so can’t say I know what it tastes like- but definitely some unusual tastes I can’t describe. Interesting and flavorsome brew.

OK, I had ONE bottle and I didn’t read the back first, so I served from the fridge. I detected no pine in the aroma, it was mostly caramelly malt. More hops in the tasting. Nice warming effect from the alcohol. Decent.

Golden brown colour, clear. Low head. Sweetish, sticky flavor. Not much aromatic pine. If I didn’t knew, I would not belive it contained pine.

Travel brochures are always telling me to “taste” a foreign country, indicating some unique set of spices or maybe an exotic local fish, but these advertisements never expressly tell me how it is to be done. My common sense tells me not to lick a local native or to start scooping autochthonous soil into my mouth, but digging into the local cuisine doesn’t seem satisfying enough. Luckily for Scotland (and to the detriment of the rest of the Empire) Heather Ales has packed the taste of the Highland hills into its beers. My favorite of the bunch is the Fraoch Heather Ale, but the Alba Pine Ale is a fine substitute to licking the bark off a Scottish pine. The color is very transparent with a lot of red hue, maybe a dark fox fur color. The smell is a lot like wine, sweet with caramel, baked apple and cranberries. What an amazing scent! Heather Ales could market a perfume from this decadent aroma. However, the flavor is a far cry from the aroma, exhibiting a much more savory touch. It tasted a bit like barbeque sauce, or a honey-glazed ham after a celeritous cough syrup flavor. I’ll definitely come back to this beer in time, if only to recommend it to the Scottish Bureau of Tourism and Travel as a fine way to draw inquisitive tourists who may want to follow up on an offer to “Taste Scotland”.

Really good, and the name is good, the art work is really nice, and the taste is very heavy, but it is about craft beers are about. I liked it very nice.

Pours amber/brown with little head. Fades to ring. Aroma has a fruity sweetness to it. Flavor much the same, with some woodsy type finish, not really pine though. Strange but decent.