WHITE HORSE:
The photo to go along with this article was originally going to have Indiana Jones on his white charger, but since Dave “The Man” Prowse is so fond of horses, I figured I'd put Vader in this one as well. Plus, I don't own any My Little Ponies to photograph with this brew. (Although the thought of drunken My Little Ponies is good for a momentary chuckle.) White Horse is named after the ancient Bronze Age chalk-cliff carving in Oxfordshire, which is near the brewery that makes the stuff. And, yes, the cuts in the hillside look pretty much exactly like the stylised pictogram on the label. This golden bitter is a good, solid, brew . . . but nothing spectacularly exceptional except for the aftertaste, which gives you a nice, beery tingle on the taste-buds for up to a quarter of an hour after you've swallowed a mouthful of the stuff. The label on the bottle also bears the advice: “For maximum refreshment - serve cool not chilled.” For the sake of experimentation and expanding the world's database of empirical knowledge, I've drunk it room temperature, cool, and ice-cold. Cool actually is the best option, allowing the aromatic compounds and alcohol to evaporate easily in the mouth and give you a good flavour while still being of a low-enough temperature to be refreshing. I'd drink it again in a heartbeat, because I think it's good, but I wouldn't necessarily go out of my way to hunt it down. Oh, yeah, and that's an empty bottle in the photo, because I drank it all before I remembered to take a picture. I did say it was good, didn't I?