Here are two things worth knowing about me before you read this review>

1) The first time I got drunk was on whisky when I was about 14. And I threw up – in several rooms of the house from memory. I told my parents I must have eaten some bad Doritos and figured I’d outsmarted them. Ahh, the intellectual superiority of the teenager. Now I’m older I know they weren’t fooled for a second. They never said anything beyond ‘‘okay, your mess, you clean it all up’’. Which I did, giving me a life-long aversion to whisky and scotch. Smelling either of them makes me feel nauseous.

2) That experience has also made me prone to avoid drinks where the alcohol is quite noticeable. That’s usually spirits – which I can drink if they’re all sweetened up and stuff – but, at the outer edge of the brewing caper, can mean beer.

That brings me to the recently released 2013 edition of Superbeast, the birthday brew from Nowra’s HopDog. I like a lot of Tim Thomas’ beers – in fact I was a fan of the 2012 Superbeast. That was a wheatwine that was a 10.6 per cent beer but I was damned if I could find any more than 5 per cent of it when I tasted it. The alcohol was very cleverly hidden.

When Tim dropped this year’s version at a local bottle shop I headed there the very same day to pick up a few bottles. I figured it would be just as awesome. I wasn’t put off by the alcohol content – at 10.5 per cent it’s lighter than last year’s Beast. And, yes, I knew it was a peated barleywine but, like a lot of other alcohol-tinged words (‘‘attenuation’’, ‘‘distilled’’, ‘‘moderation’’) I brushed past it and pretended I knew what it meant.

The word I’m talking about here is ‘‘peated’’ which, if I wasn’t so dumb, would have tipped me off to the fact that this beer would likely be too strong for the likes of me. It would have made me go ‘‘hey, peat is that stuff that they use to flavour spirits like scotch. And you don’t like that stuff’’.

But it didn’t. Neither did reading the label when I got home and seeing the phrase ‘‘90 per cent Scottish peated distillers malt’’. But what did tip me off – big time – was the aroma wafting out of the glass of Superbeast I poured.

It smelt like scotch and whisky to me. And I thought ‘‘oh no, I think this beer is going to be too strong for me’’. But I figured I had to taste it – I mean it was still beer and all. The dominant character is a really really strong peaty smokiness and I just couldn’t hack it.

Which is obviously my fault, because anyone with a brain in their head would have already known that’s exactly what it’s supposed to taste like. There’s nothing actually wrong with the beer – hell, it’s getting plenty of praise on Untappd (‘‘Epiphany beer’’, ‘‘Perfectly balanced smoked beer’’ and ‘‘5 stars’’ are just some examples). And I reckon this is exactly what Tim wanted to end up with when he started brewing it.

It’s just too strong and spirit-like for me (though I did find the slight underlying sweetness quite appealing. I reckon I drank more of the beer than I otherwise might have just to taste that bit again.

If you’re fond of a big, thick scotch or whisky, then you’ll probably really like this beer. But if you’re an alcohol wuss like me, you might want to try something else in the HopDog kennel of beers.