Good for improving your eyesight, better to spot those rare beers.
ABV: 4.4%
Origin: Huddersfield, Kirklees, Yorkshire, England
First published: 26 March 2001
Another review from the archive written for the pioneering Oxford Bottled Beer Database (OBBD). I’ve left it uncorrected — so please read it in that historical spirit. Kitchen went into receivership later in 2001, perhaps not surprisingly given the beers sounded so unappetising no matter what they tasted like (the turnip and nutmeg beers referred to below were dubbed Tormented Turnip and Mystic Nutmeg). The clear glass bottles didn’t help either.
This British micro, in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, was founded by a former chef keen to experiment with ingredients more normally found in a kitchen: other brews feature turnip and nutmeg. The beers, including this one, picked up at the Pitfield Beer Shop, come in clear glass bottles, not an ideal form of packaging for a fine beer as it offers little protection from light and heat, but in this case it is presumably to reassure customers that the contents at least looks beer-like and doesn’t resemble carrot juice or vegetable soup.
There is no explanation, either, as to how the additional ingredients are used – with carrots, which contain some sugars, I would hazard a guess that they go into the mash to up the level of fermentables. There’s a suspicious whiff of gimmickry about all this, so it’s interesting to see how the beer measures up: not badly, as it turns out, though you’d be hard pressed to spot the healthy Vitamin A-laden root vegetable in the finished product, except perhaps for a very faint carroty hint in the aroma and a toffeeishness that might just about resemble caramelised carrots or carrot cake.
Otherwise this is a lively amber brew with a smooth but not generous head, announcing its bottle conditioning with a thick sediment clearly visible through the glass. The aroma, apart from the carroty notes, is sharp and hoppy, the texture slightly oily, and the palate well-balanced, with toffeeish malt soon offset by hoppy bitterness that persists in a sharp finish. It’s pleasant and refreshing, if not terribly complex, and you wonder how much contribution the carrots actually make, other than to the labelling and promotion.
