Heather Ales Alba

Brewed by Williams Brothers (Heather Ales)
Style: Traditional Ale
Alloa, Scotland

Serve in Dimpled mug, English pint, Stein, Yard

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Bottle. Hazy brown color with a large light brown head that diminished slowly. Good complex sweet piney aroma. Medium body with a sticky texture. Moderate sweet fruity flavor with average finish. Very interesting ale.

A Mes rate: 33cl bottle from Odd Bins. Very attractive dark amber colour with a slight off white film. LOVE the smell. Pine and spruce fall out of the top of the glass but underneath there is lots of complexity. Estery, plenty of berries, sugar, malt, yeast, some bready notes and just a lick of vanillary alcohol. Ooh pithy cherries too. Lovely aroma. Flavour is not quite so complex but still pretty good. Spruce and pine is not usually my thing but it works really well here. The berries come at you thick and fast and pretty much any stemmed fruit I can think of seems to be in there. Alcohol is hidden really well until the finish but it comes in nice and soft and just adds a really pleasant warmth on the way down. There is just a very slight acrid sticky feel at the back of the palate that lets it down a little for me. Maybe it is just a touch too sweet but I like a lot of what these guys make and this one is very close to excellent.

Poured a dark amber color with a large (4 finger) off white head. Lots and lots of large floaties. Fruity aroma with berries. Tastes of berries, pine, and caramel. I didn’t care for this one too much.

Bottled. Red brown colour with a beige head. Malt and sweet caramel in the aroma. Roasted sweet caramel in the flavour.

Bottled. Copper-coloured with a thick lasting white head. Oddly malty aroma with a very herbal character. Butterscotch, fruit, and soapy. Flavour of sweet malts and bitter herbs, although nothing I would identify as pine or spruce per se, but definitely a herbal woodsiness. Finish is rich, malty, and bitter. Doesn’t seem particularly hoppy, but still bitter.

Chestnut brown, slightly hazy. Yellowish head, fast dissipating. Roasted malts first & foremost. Then a bit of diacetyl, not much. Also something 'foresty' - not nessecarily spruce or pine. Taste are roasted malts again, even some coffee; no diacetyl traceable. Retronasal taste both bitterish and indeed pine-ish, or bog-myrtle. A wine-ish quality too, perfumed. Quite well bodied. Rather dry and outspoken dry-out effect. Very long aftertaste which finally becomes the real pinekernels oily-resiny feeling. This is my second try of the "Alba", but the first brewed in Strathaven instead of at Maclays. It seems the overly pine-taste has made way for a much better balanced beer. The perfumy character and aftertaste saves it from blandness. Quite good.

Bottled. Glorious aroma of toffee, lemongrass and shampoo! (Am I really typing this?) The appearance is mid brown and there is no lasting head or lacing. Full creamy chewy flavour with hints of caramel and grass. A very good beer.

Cask at Bierra Paradiso. Clear dark rusty orange color. Moderately heavy honey and mapel malt nose, with just a faint bit of grassy, spicy, oily hops. Wet, low carbonation as expected, but a bit too oily and slick for my liking... makes me think of kelp with the slimy texture and slightly vegetal, twangy flavor. Earthy, peaty, spruce and pine spices along with some dull orange-flavored hops in the finish. Weird beer.

Elegant and efficient pine needles stuck together by their bitter sap of course and a good serving of molasses…Fruit candy and dirty grass…Very original and very good…

Quite a murky red/brown in colour. Aromas are more sweet and herbal than pine. Its odd that IPAs have more pine flavoured hops than a pine beer. Still, this isn't bad. It certainly doesn't seem to taste its alcohol level. Maybe a touch too sweet but that is the nature of traditional non-hoppy beers. Heather Ales make some worthwhile beers.