Beerswax

Stone & Wood Lager…Rolling Stones - Goats Head Soup

Yes, dear readers, another lager. Why do I do this to myself? Because I love all of you and want to be the voice of informative reason and….nah, fuck that, I just like whingeing. 

So, I’ve had mixed responses to this brewery in the past. I originally hated their Pacific Ale, but I’ll do a re-review soon, because I’ve actually grown to like it, and drinking it in summer makes me comprehend what they were trying to do much better. But this is a review for their lager, and as much as I want to like it, I can’t. It’s not horrid, but it has all the usual hallmarks of adjunct-style lagers with a few hops added in there to try and mask the nasty. And it doesn’t work. Stale grain and odd bitterness at the end make for a middling drink. Avoid. They can (and do) do much better than this.

I’ll come out and say it - I prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles. I always have. I know that their backgrounds compared to their respective musical styles/images are a bit mixed up (i.e. the [originally] clean-cut Beatles were actually Liverpudlian thugs and the Stones were twats from art school) but the Stones, for me, were always harder edged and more interesting. And in terms of longevity, well, this album was released in ‘73, and the Beatles were, well, dead by this time. Let It Be, fuckers. And any bloke who can be clinically dead like Keith Richards and still be SOMEHOW WALKING deserves kudos. Anyway, digression aside, this album was laid-back, but quite dark and in some places raucous and hellish, like a lot of their catalogue. Famous for the single “Angie”, I like it for the infamous “Star Star”, or “Starfucker”, as it was called and should have remained so. A very cool album which was bagged by that shithead Lester Bangs but which deserves its place alongside their classics.