Haliburton Highlands Honey Brown Ale

“Store cool. Enjoy fresh.” So admonishes 500mL bottles of Haliburton Highlands Brewing’s Honey Brown Ale; so into the fridge it went and down my gullet soon after. A 5% alcohol ale from Haliburton, Ontario, this stuff is brewed using “locally produced honey and oats” to produce a handsome amber ale that pours under a blanket of eggshell head.

The beer has a honey-sweet nose offset against a roasted malt base. The flavour is equally well-balanced, with sweet oat and honey notes that hold there own against legitimate brown ale elements of malted toastiness and an English-style ale bitterness.

Honey brown ales often falter, as far as I’m concerned, when they focus too much on the honey and not enough on the brown ale—Halliburton’s take on the style doesn’t fall into that trap—it is a brown ale first, with sticky molasses, rich malt, and decent bitterness—dressed up with some local honey sweetness. This beer should have been in the 6% range, but otherwise, I thought it worked nicely.

Rating: 8.0 out of 10.