An Amateur Beer Snob: John Smith's Original Bitter

Thursday, June 3, 2010

John Smith's Original Bitter

Beer score: 7.3
Web site: John Smith's
Without a doubt the best beer I've ever had from a can (of course I poured it into a glass when tasting). Very smooth and somewhat frothy with a pretty strong bitter flavor that isn't overpowering. Many typical American beer drinkers will find this beverage too strong, but it's just a lovely brew from John Smith's Limited, The Brewery, in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire. Time for some facts: Bitters are a type of ale that are highly hopped and normally very bitter in flavor. Bitters are pretty common on tap in England.

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About the beer rankings

The listings commonly found to the right of this text will include the name of the beer, a link to the brewer's website (if there is one), my numerical ranking based upon my own scale of 0.1 to 10.0, and a little of my personal thoughts about each beer. Here and there I might also throw in a few funny or interesting quotes about beer as well as any other information I think would be of interest. And if you’re curious about my ranking systems, let’s just say that a 5.0 is a decent beer, a 1.0 is an awful beer and a 10.0 is a fantastic beer. It's simple and meant to be.

ABV: This stands for alcohol by volume. It is a percentage of alcohol in the drink. Most beers are usually somewhere around five percent in the U.S. I only recently decided to add this after some prodding by readers.

IBU: This stand for International Bitterness Units. It's a scale for measuring the basic bitterness of a beer, though that's truly oversimplifying things. Some beers might have a higher IBU but not taste quite so bitter because of the amount of malt added. I suppose a more accurate way to gauge this would be to say the IBU reflects the amount of hops in a beer. Truly heavy beers will have an IBU of 30 to 50, while lighter brews will be 10 or even less. The IBU isn't always readily available, but I'll add it whenever I can find it.

The story behind this blog

Prior to the mid-90s I was your typical American beer drinker. Budweiser was pretty much it for me. But I made friends in the mid-90s who introduced me to good beer. I mean really good beer. From then on, my tastes in beer have bordered on snobbery. Then, for Christmas 1997 some friends gave me a present of one of those large boxes of different types of Saranac beer. So, on December 20, 1997, I started “Ty’s pages for Beer Snobs” on the Geocities Web sites. The site wasn’t for brewing experts, but was meant to be more of a laid-back list of beers I had tasted and my brief thoughts about them. Again, this wasn’t for the experts, but I did try to toss in a little education here and there, things I had learned about beer over the years. In 2009 Geocities decided to shut down. That meant after 12 years of writing about beer, I had to find a new venue. That's where this blog comes in. This is meant to be a very casual blog, without getting into all the science and yaddy yaddy about beer. It's meant to be a blog for people who want to taste good beer, but who don't really care about all the hops and yeast and recipes that go into beer. Also, I came up with the idea to self-publish an ebook titled “An Amateur Beer Snob’s Guide to Beer,” which reprints much of what was to be found on my old Web site. The ebook itself is now available on the Kindle from Amazon and online at Smashwords.

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Thursday, June 3, 2010

John Smith's Original Bitter

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