Pouring a hazy dark amber with a reddish tint, this surprised me by being a good deal lighter than I was expecting.  It’s nicely fruity and smooth, but stays a bit too ‘small’ in the taste department for me. “Scotch Ale” just makes me expect massive great big fullness, and this doesn’t have it. Labelling aside, though, it’s perfectly tasty after-dinner type stuff.

And by after-dinner on this occasion, we mean after steak tartar, and with barbequed pavlova. Given that insane food-matching challenge, it performed ridiculously admirably.

Verbatim: Red Hill Brewery Scotch Ale. 5/10/08 $3.5 @ Markets. A hazy dark amber with reddish tint; so a lot lighter than many others. Much lighter taste, too. Pleasant, but not quite what I expected from the name. Nicely fruity and smooth, but not huge + dark.

Afterthoughts, October 2010: I realised a little while later that my expectations were somewhat confounded by the scotch ale I was most familiar with, Renaissance ‘Stonecutter’, being both abnormally dark and abnormally massive in the flavour department. So this has no labelling problem — and neither does Stonecutter, really; they’re just extreme ends of the style, each.

And damn, I did manage a good little run of beers that day.

There’s the beginnings of a trend towards a wee fusion between beermakers and winemakers, and here’s a good example. Pepperjack is, ordinarily, a Shiraz. Of which I’m quite fond, despite being a Malt Nerd. I haven’t yet found out just how it’s incorporated into their Ale, but it allegedly is. The result is basically a decent straight up-and-down bitter ale. When I’m in that mood, I’d rather a Little Creature’s Rogers, but this can’t really be faulted. Except maybe in marketing terms; it’d probably be a difficult style for “evangelism” to wine drinkers. But maybe that was never really their concern; they’ve made something pretty tasty and pretty interesting and, well, pretty. That’s enough to warrant a tip of our glasses.

Verbatim: Pepperjack Ale. 5/10/08 $3.5 @ Markets. Made with Pepperjack Shiraz, somehow. It doesn’t say. Basically a decent straight up and down bitter ale. Maybe not different enough, for the odd pitching. Not one for evangelising to wine drinkers despite appearance.

Afterthoughts, October 2010: So here I was, sitting at the bar on my night off and tinkering with these things, uploading some more of the backlog. And I’m thinking to myself ‘what to drink?’, when it occurs to me that I have a bottle of this in my personal stash in the fridge. How appropriate. (Many thanks to Glenn, who I used to work with in Melbourne, who grabbed me some Interesting Looking Beers when he came over not long ago.)

On another go, I’m a bigger fan. It’s tasty, more ‘different’ than I remember, and definitely has a shirazzy zing.