Fullers Vintage Ale 2013, 1pt. 0.9 fl/oz. 8.5% ABV. From Fuller Smith & Turner Griffin Brewery, London. Honey amber with a gentle froth.
I saw this box with this beer selling for about 10 bucks, and I figured, with packaging like that, it must be worth a try. So, surprisingly, I tried it. I'm one glass in already, and what I want to decide about this beer is if it deserves all that packaging. One box with two labels, an insert describing previous vintage ales, a bottle with two labels, and inside all that, a beer.
The beer, so you know, is pretty tasty. I has a rich metallic-caramel flavor with layers and waves of banana, yeast, malt, and an acidic tinge. Reading that back, it sounds awful, but, in reality, it is tasty. Square that with your brain how you can. I like tasty beer, for obvious reasons, but I have had truly beautiful beer in the past. This ain't that.
I hope to examine this beer's layers of point-of-sale marketing, judge each element's merit, and ultimately decide where the whole thing falls on a scale of gilded-lily to polished-turd. With that in mind, lets talk about packaging, pomp-deservedness, and whether pigs have wings.
Starting with the innermost layer, THE BOTTLE:
The brown glass bottle is shaped in what could be regarded as a familiar English style, with its bumpy, quasi-dumbbell body and stubby-fallace neck. Of course it is. This makes perfect sense and is even expected from an old British brewery, and is neither a gilded-lily or a polished-turd.
The front label could be described as efficient. A tall oval with charcoal, pale tans, splashes of Merlot red, and just a few touches of gold foil, gives the drinker all the basic information: what you are drinking, how much of it did the bottle start out with, who made it, and finally, this individual beer's production number. It is the production number that gives me pause. I don't plan to keep this beer or even just the bottle. I have no intention of showing it off to my friends. It can't be resealed and trotted out at special occasions. Also, I'm pretty sure it will fail to appreciate in value. So, why should I care what specific number of this limited edition I am drinking? Why would anyone care? Maybe if I let the media know that I am currently drinking No.109166, they will dispatch a news crew, but I doubt it. To be fair, though, if I were releasing a limited edition of anything, I also might reasonably number the individuals. Pride? Practical? Bragadocio? Given that this label is already partly gilded, and the numbering only comes off a bit as flash-for-flash-sake, I'll call the front label about 90% gilded-lily.
The back label is a very different story. In stark contrast to the front label's efficiency, the back label is a mess of text blocks and governmental mandates. It reminds me of the climax of the movie Titanic, with a small raft covered in something fancy but uninteresting surrounded by ham-fisted warnings about choices and consequences and some banal prattle. I respect the mandate to include many of these bits, but this at least 95% polished-turd.
Finally, the seal and cap deserve a comment. The cap is pleasantly marked gold on black with the Fuller's gryphon, which is pretty cool. Sadly, the sticky seal completely obscures it. The seal just reminds us, again, that this is the 2013 limited edition. To the seal's credit, it was super fun to open the bottle through the seal. It felt momentous and was wholly unnecessary, but kind of cool. We'll call the cap a given (I'm glad it wasn't a cork) and just judge the seal. This beer in no way needs a seal. 100% polished-turd.
How about THE BOX:
The box is nicely made and tastefully appointed. It feels good in the hand and invites the eye to read its labels. Somebody at Fuller's deserves a "kudos" for this box. A box on a beer shelf has a siren's song for any booze-voyager. It is a mystery and a gamble, calling us to find out for ourselves what treasures or traps might be hidden inside. The labels on the box are slightly slicker versions of the labels on the bottle, the fronts are both pleasant, but the back label on the box is a vast improvement on its bottle sister. But, does this beer deserve such a grand enticement? No. The beer may be tasty, but that doesn't really justify the box, does it? There are lots of excellent beers, even limited edition beers without boxes. While the box is very well executed, it is also just one more thing to recycle later. Being kind-of-bullshit and kind-of-tribute, the box is 50% gilded-lily and 50% polished-turd.
Finally that little INSERT:
The insert is a little, four-page, single fold scrap I just happened to notice, like an awful toy at the bottom of my beer-cereal box. It takes a moment to describe the vintage ale series and the previous iterations going back to 1997. I started reading it. I did not finish reading it. Not only was it very dull, but it is also very pointless. I cannot go and find these past beers. Surely no average customer has kept them in anticipation of some future special occasion. So, why do I care? In a series of limited edition serieses (probably a real word), shouldn't I expect variations and distinctions? I don't need to know what they are for any reason I can think of. All the same, I suppose the maker of the serieses has a right to be proud of the current series and view it in context of its predecessors. In the end, this is a tasty beer, but no so tasty that I want to break out its family photo album. 99% polished-turd.
CONCLUSION:
Don't pay for one of these beers with your own money. Don't try to impress others by buying them one of these beers with your own money. However, if someone buys you one of these, you will enjoy a pretty good beer. If they start to tell you all about it, give you its individual series number, show you the box, and yammer on about the previous 18 versions, do slowly back away and try not to make eye-contact. There is way more polished-turd to this beer than gilded-lily.
No comments:
Post a Comment