Ruddles Rhubarb - Blah, Blah, Blah

If you Google Ruddles Rhubarb you will find the first hit is its page on RateBeer, and the second hit is a forum post on the same website. Indeed there is no reference to it at all on Greene King's website. Yet this is the beer which has just won the Te--o Beer Challenge. (sorry I cannot bring myself to type that word) It beat 63 other beers to win that accolade, unless of course you believe the same conspiracy theorists who say GK paid for the silver gong IPA earned in the Champion Beer Of Britain Competition a couple of years ago, and would therefore believe some sort of underhand tactics are going on.

I don't normally go out of my way to taste GK beers but after my friend harrisoni on Ratebeer called it "truly truly disgusting, one of the worst beers in the world." and said: "Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please.... I beg of you, do not buy this beer. It is truly, truly horrible. I threw mine away after about 1/3 of the bottle. It is disgusting. Do not what ever you do be tempted to buy it." I just had to try it.

I need to say that I am pretty disgusted that GK choose to use the name Ruddles for this beer. The traditional brewery in England's smallest county would never have produced such a beer before the sequence of events which saw them now being part of the GK family. Of course the brewery in Langham is no more. Why didn't they just call it Greene King Rhubarb?

So to the beer. It ain't good, but it certainly isn't the worst beer I've ever tasted. It has a nice reddy amber colour which does look nice in the glass. The aroma is just like rhubarb and custard sweets and the taste is also pretty heavy on the rhubarb, but I don't think rhubarb is such a ridiculous ingredient. There is a little bit of tartness which you would like from a decent fruit beer (even though Rhubarb is a vegetable). I think it works better than blackberries which to my mind always lead to a super sweet beer which tastes too much like pop. It does have cloying tendencies, it's certainly not a beer you'd have a session on, and the pasteurization is very obvious. I scored it a 2.2 on the RateBeer scale, and that's not too bad. I'm glad I didn't pay for the beer as I don't like T--cos or GK getting my money, and I now never have to drink the beer again.