Name: Hawthorn Premium Pale Ale

Style: Pale Ale

Country: Australia

ABV: 4.7%

Beer description: A pretty robust and hoppy pale ale, more of the American style.  The aroma is great, lots of tropical fruit, sticky and sweet like dunking your head in a passion fruit.  There’s some malt in there too.  Taste is hoppy but not overly bitter – you know it’s there but it’s not overpowering.  In this way, the beer is recommended for people who want to move to hoppier beers but haven’t taken the plunge.

This beer is a little on the sweet side, which is good and bad, but counterbalanced well with the bitterness from the hops.  Slight pine and spice tastes come through which also interact well with the bitterness.

Drink when: during medium weather for most occasions.  Not too heavy, not too light, it’s a pretty typical pale ale in feel.  This beer would holder up better as a refresher on a hot day than a belly filler on a cold one.

Drink with: almost anything.  It’s a pale ale!

Rating to style/intention – 8/10: pretty spot on albeit a little robust for how they’re positioning the beer.

Rating on sessionability – 7/10: I could knock back a few of these.  Alcohol isn’t too high and it’s interesting without being too hard.

Rating on complexity – 6.5/10: I want to rate it higher because it’s obviously a thoughtful beer, but it’s fairly two dimensional.

General rating – 9/10: this is a great and thoughtful beer, as would be expected from Hawthorn.  Well done!

Overall rating and summary – 7.6/10:  while this beer probably deserves at least an 8, I think it could have been a little more interesting had they tweaked it a bit.

Hawthorn Premium Pale Ale:

7.63/10