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.