Bruce Williams is an experimental sort of brewer, always willing to try out new ingredients in his beers.
It all began about 25 years ago when Bruce, who ran a homebrew shop in Partick at the time, got his hands on an old Highland recipe for heather ale, translated from Gaelic.
The beer proved a great success, and Williams Brothers Brewery was born. After heather ale, other archaic recipes followed using gooseberries, elderberries, pine shoots, seaweed and tayberries (though not all at the same time!). This week we encounter one of the more recent additions to Bruce’s portfolio, Good Times, brewed with meadowsweet and elderflower.
It has a pale golden, lagerish appearance with a bright, vigorous, sparkly and fairly persistent head. There is a delicious and enticing aroma of sweet vanilla with herbal and floral notes, and fruit too… hints of lychee, grapefruit and lemon zest.
In sharp contrast, the flavour is quite dry with that lemony note most prominent and plenty of penetrating herbal, nettley bitterness.
Despite the five per cent abv, it is light-bodied, allowing the delicate but distinct floral and spice flavours to show through.
The aftertaste is dry and very bitter with a touch of aniseed creeping in at the finish to round off a distinctive, and very refreshing beer.
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