Left Hand Good Juju Ginger

Brewed by Left Hand Brewing Co.
Style: Spice/Herb/Vegetable
Longmont, Colorado USA

A reasonable botanical, but the main issue with this beer is that although the ginger presence is good it is sitting in a beer that isn’t. Not the disaster that a number of additive beers prove to be, but this one would be greatly improved if the beer itself was better.

Pours gold into a tumbler. Head quickly recedes to nothing. Slight ginger aromas. Extreme malt upfront with mild ginger flavors. Flat.

Rich golden color with a creamy eggshell head that lingers. Gorgeous ginger on the nose. The ginger follows through on the palate and is all that really comes through. If you love ginger you should try this.

Bottle--Poured a pale gold to orange color with a white head. Aroma of ginger. The taste was all ginger, too much in fact, makes a little tough to drink. Produce Place 1.49

On tap at the Brew Kettle. Poured clear coppery-golden with a short cap of white head. The aroma picked up a fat slab of ginger.. maybe, just maybe, some caramel behind. The flavor had more to it than the nose, but it was still primarily ginger.. some caramel notes and light herbal bitterness quietly joined in.. dry, wet ginger root on the back. Dry and medium-bodied on the palate with high carbonation.. cleared up the sinuses a little.

The first sniff of this induced a Proustian smell-memory that transported me 35 years back to my first attempt at home-brewing. (Crap - that prolly means I have to write an epic seven-volume novel about the experience. Where did he find the time?) I was 10 years old and the beverage was ginger beer. Under my dad’s careless tutelage, I filled a couple of dozen bottles, then corked and stored them in the dark of my bedroom cupboard. Then we left for a holiday. By the time we returned, about half the bottles had detonated their corks, sending ginger beer spewing down the cupboard shelves onto the bedroom carpet. There ended my first and last experiment in home brewing. The odour lingered for years. This Colorado ginger-infused ale is a cut above my pubescent effort, but it’s no great shakes. Hazy apricot-gold with some fine sediment adrift beneath a paltry skim of suds. Lots of ginger root in the aroma atop faint malts and some lychee fruitiness. This particular bottle was criminally under-carbonated - a less dangerous error than mine, but disappointing nonetheless. This style needs busy carbonation to be refreshing. It’s a very dry customer, which is a plus, but there’s little depth to it. Strip out the ginger and I doubt the underlying beer would set the heather alight. Some spice in the finish. May have been a dud bottle, but this fell short of expectations. (355ml bottle from IBS, Perth. BB 20/06/08)

Bottle. Cloudy golden pour with a white head. Grainy malt aroma with a strong ginger presence. Very strong ginger flavor with a caramel background. Something new and interesting which I like.

Sweet ginger malt aroma. Cloudy red yellow colour with good head and lacing. Ginger malt flavour with spices. Fizzy palate.