A freshly-poured schooner of the Shouty Man from HopDog.

I tend to steer clear of brown ales. Not for any logical reason, like I don’t like the taste or something like that. No, it’s really quite stupid. I don’t like the name.
See, brown is a pretty boring colour – and surely a very close relative to beige – so in my head I think a ‘‘brown ale’’ must be a pretty dull beer. Like the ugly stepchild of the beer family (though, of course, not as ugly as that stepchild called ‘‘macro lager’’).

But I’m willing to make an exception for a brown ale from Tim Thomas at HopDog, because I’ve liked most of his beers a big thumbs-up (funnily enough, one of the beers I’ve been a bit cool on is Children of Darkness. It’s funny because that black IPA been a huge cult favourite with many, many people but it didn’t float my boat when I tried it just after last year’s GABS. I think it was because I had very set ideas on what a black IPA should taste like – it should be like a normal IPA that’s just black but the Children combined the piney IPA notes with toasty flavours of a dark ale. I told Tim about this last week and he gave me a fresh bottle to see if my my opinion had changed. You will see whether it has on Thursday).

When Tim’s brown ale, bearing the wonderful name of Shouty Man, went on tap at the Illawarra Brewery bar a while agIo, happened to have that day off, so I went down to try it. And came away very impressed. It’s perhaps only a brown ale in name because, colour-wise it looks very much like a cola. I got some some hoppy notes when I stuck my nose in the glass but the real joy came when I took a big mouthful (to hell with this sipping rubbish).

What I got was a beer with a gloriously velvety smooth texture that coated my mouth. Flavour-wise, there’s distinct notes of coffee, dark chocolate and some hop bitterness but none overbalances the others. I’ve read others comparing it to HopDog’s Sticky Figgy fig beer, suggesting this is the less-impressive brown ale, but I beg to differ. For mine, they’re both distinct enough to stand on their own merits. Does that mean I’ve changed my opinion on brown ales? Not really, I’m just making a very welcome exception in this instance.