Vocation Life & Death

The pale amber beer has an aroma laced with verdant, sappy hops, a peppery spiciness and a sherbety grapefruit note that continues on into the taste. There’s plenty of malt in the mouth to buttress this generous hopping but, flavorwise, the grain adds no more than a hint of bread and a silky sliver of caramel. Hops burn gently on the swallow as grapefruit and a touch of caramel characterize the dry, bitter finish. A tasty and full-bodied beer that sensibly does not overexaggerate the hops and is all the more quaffable for that.

“Three kilos of hops,” it says on the can, and they really deliver. The brewery is based in Yorkshire in northern England, where speech is as blunt as the beer. “No messin’,” they would say, and the bronze-colored, 6.5% beer has a no-nonsense, pungent aroma of peaches, grapefruit and sundry tropical fruits, with honeyed malt and herbal hops. Juicy malt, bitter hops and bittersweet fruit fill the mouth followed by a long finish that is intensely bitter and hoppy, but with a fine balance of biscuit malt and rich bittersweet fruit.