NOSTALGIA is a wonderfully evocative thing. It lets you feel selective about the past so that only the warm and joyous moments get brought to the surface and even the mundane becomes magical. Like bouncing into the sweet shop after school and asking for a quarter bag of rhubarb and custard. (Full disclosure: I had no idea then what form of measurement ‘a quarter’ was and am still not so sure now).
This was the sort of shop that had rows upon rows of boiled sweets in jars and the anticipation was palpable as you listened to your chosen selection tinkle into the metal scales before being bagged.
I always had a thing for rhubarb and custard, both the sweets and the slightly anarchic cartoon with the growling guitar at the start. So when I came across a couple of beers which aimed to harness the magic of my favourite boiled sweet, I was intrigued, not least because one was a sour and the other a pale ale.
First up is the sour and Colonel Custard from the recently relocated Bullhouse Brewery, now in south Belfast. The theme is in keeping with a certain detective-based board game and you might need an enterprising sleuth to work out where the 7 per cent abv is in this beer.
It pours a light amber colour with a fluffy off-white head which doesn’t hang around for long. There’s a lovely, creamy softness to it with and initial sweet hit before the tartness of the rhubarb begins to emerge. Like most sours, there is minimal carbonation going on here, and combined with the lactose and vanilla, this allows the beer to go down quite smoothly.
The sourness of the rhubarb comes late and then lingers around the mouth, much like the sweets did. Once you’d sucked the creamy custard away, that sharp rhubarb taste fairly woke the senses up.
English brewers Brew York love a good pun when they see one, so their rhubarb and custard-inspired brew had me at the name. Rhubarbra Streisand is a 5.5 per cent milkshake pale ale, which effectively means they’ve added lactose.
It pours a hazy amber colour in the glass and you start to pick up those rhubarb aromas straight away. However, it is the custardy sweetness which first hits the palate. There’s an almost sugar sweetness before the rhubarb arrives, evocative of a sugar-sprinkled rhubarb tart before the sourness of the earthy fruit bursts through.
