Brewery: Stoudt's Brewing Co.
Where: Adamstown, Pennsylvania
Style: Extra Special Bitter
IBU: 32 IBU
ABV: 5.0%

Today's sampling is a first-time tasting of a Stoudt's Brewing Company beer for me. I picked up a bottle of Stoudt's Scarlet Lady Ale, which is an English style known as ESB or Extra Special Bitter.  One of these days I need to look into the style to see if I can figure out where that name came from, but Extra Special Bitters are typically not bitter at all. 

This beer poured with a rich bronze color and capped off with a nice head to match.  The beer has a sweet and earthy aroma which comes from the Maris Otter and Caramel malts that went into the recipe coupled with the Willamette hopes used to finish for aroma.  The beer tastes fine, but it finishes a little on the dry side for me for some reason.  It doesn't quite carry the pleasant aftertaste that I get from some other beers in this style, but it's still worth a try if you like the ESB style.  This particular bottle may be better served at 50° or so instead of the 37° where my refrigerator is set, but that's the case with a lot of beers.  You will never know what you might be missing in a beer until you try it a little warmer than you might normally drink.  On a scale of 1-10 in this style, I'd give the Scarlet Lady a 6...

I was at a local grocery store last week, and they had a mix your own six pack with only eight different choices of beers.  Tonight's sampling is from the Redhook Ale Brewery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Redhook ESB is a very tasty blend of 2-row and caramel malts which create the beautiful copper color in this beer.  At 28 IBU, this beer isn't as hoppy as an IPA, so it's got a really nice balance between the hops and malts, and the caramel malt sweetness of this beer shines through nicely in each sip. 

I have never really understood why they call these beers bitters (extra special bitter).  They aren't really bitter, but they do have a pronounced hop presence.  This beer rings in at 5.7% ABV and is definitely worthy of future visits...