New Castle Brown Ale

New Castle Brown Ale
Score: 7.5/10

New Castle Brown Ale should have been off my list of beers to try a long time ago yet here I am typing out a review merely seconds after my first sips. New Castle is the world's most well-known brown ale. The owning company of New Castle is Heineken and it has been produced at the John Smith's Brewery in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, England since 1972. It has a basic alcohol content of 4.7% though it does do a fine job of masking any alcoholic after tastes.
When I first popped the cap off this beer my nostrils were over come with probably the worst skunky beer smell imaginable. It literally smelled like a skunk snuck into the John Smith's Brewery after catching his skunk wife cheating on him with a hotter more well endowed skunk man in order to commit skunk suicide in one of the vats of New Castle Brown Ale. This however, did not stop the quality assurance supervisor who decided the skunk smell made it unique and gave the ok for continued production with a resounding "Fuck it! Still tastes good." Yea the smell is that bad. If this does not stop you however, then more power too you because the taste luckily does not even remotely resemble the odor that emits what one would presume was a bottle of hate juice. The taste is rather smooth and after a somewhat harsh bitterness initially I found myself thoroughly enjoying the warming caramel style flavor that ends this beer. One of New Castles primary features is the amount of hops used in the brewing process which is actually very little. The hops for those of you who do not know are the plants (the flower of the plant to be precise) that are used in a beer's brewing process to provide flavor, preservation, and stability of the beer. In short, hops make beer taste like....well, beer. In this case the amount of hops is less, therefore, the amount of bitter beer taste is lessened making this a delightfully well rounded beer for those looking to start on something simple. The overall taste is quite different from beers I have tried in my past making it difficult to make a comparison.
The price of a 6-pack of New Castle usually varies somewhere between $7-$8 dollars keeping it well in the realm of affordable grab-n-go beers. The reason for New Castle's 7.5/10 score comes from two major draw backs which are undoubtedly related. First off, the bottle is clear. Most of you may wonder, "What does the color of the bottle have to do with how good a beer is?" I'll tell you. The darker a bottle is, the less likely it is that a beer will lose its natural beer flavor. This is because when light hits molecules in hops known as isohumulones, they are torn apart. Some of these free-floating bits attach to sulfur molecules in the beer giving it that distinctive skunky smell or taste. Some of you may still be asking, "That's interesting and all, but that still doesn't answer my question." Well, if you'll stop interrupting and let me finish I was just getting to that so hold your horses you impatient bastards! When beer is exposed to ultra-violet light or in most cases florescent light, (beer coolers in stores) darker bottles tend to be more efficient at preventing light from entering the bottle and ruining a perfectly good beer. Green and clear bottles provide almost no protection from the light which is why most beers are bottled in darker brown bottles. Secondly, (most of you see where this is going), the smell as mentioned before is absolutely terrible and I, as an amateur critic, am chalking this up primarily to the clear bottles. Although, this is not to say that the beer was not intended to smell this way.