“It tastes like garlic. And Werther’s Originals!” Promised the promotor of the cause of Leaf, our Beer of the Week.

Never ones to shirk away from a flavour combo that sounds like a Masterchef ingredients challenge gone awry, ICIP scooped up a few bottles of this altbeir-style smoked beer from Orbit, a relatively-new entry to the London craft brewing map.

Leaf is a “Rauch Alt”, which took (me) some unpicking. Rauchbier is an old, German beer style, typically smokey (rauch means smoke in German, I learned thanks to this beer) because the young malt is dried over beech wood. Altbier – literally, “old beer” – is a German-style brown ale.

So, label glossed, we were expecting a smokey brown ale – and, man, is that what this beer delivers.

It pours a clean, ember-y red, with a melting, sandy head. Once you get past the woody smoke on the nose, Leaf reveals all sorts of interesting, complex layers – soft cheese, something quite earthy, butterscotch and – yep, garlic.

Taste-wise it manages some impressive special effects; like a sweet out of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory it hits you with toffee caramel – so far, so brown ale – with, I thought, a tang of citrus. But that rolls away to peaty, Islay whisky. Warmed just slightly, it feels afterwards like woodsmoke is billowing around your mouth. It’s almost disconcerting and clings a good minute after you’ve finished, like the morning after a bonfire.

For me, there wasn’t much left behind after the smoke died out. But I’m a tongue-numbed hop addict and my taste-testers disagreed completely, detecting butterscotch-y notes long after I’d chugged another few mouthfuls to recreate the brilliant smoke effect.

Even though it didn’t linger enough for my palate, this is a fun beer from an exciting newish brewery. Orbit works out of a double railway arch in Walworth in south east London (what is it with breweries and arches?); they have a core range of three beers (a kolsch, an altbeir and a pale ale) and some limited edition bottles, of which Leaf is one. I tried Seven, their stout, at Islington Craft this week – it was brilliant – so I suggest stocking up on anything you can lay your hands on.

At a glance

A smouldering brown ale; smokey and complex. Drink alone (I mean without food. You know what I mean) or with chocolate-y puddings, smoked, salty (vegan alternatives to ed.) meat

ABV: 6.2% 

Cost: £2.40 at Green Lane Larder, in north London, which we recently discovered and is absolutely brilliant so please don’t all go there at once and buy all the delicious beer 😥

… when it’s a golden ale?

We loved the beers that emerged from Guinness’ last Brewers’ Project, historic reinterpretations of a pair of 200-year old porter recipes that transmogrified into a Dublin Porter and a West Indies Porter last September.

So we were excited to hear that, for beer experiment number three, a brewery famous for making a beer so chunky and dark it was practically a health food supplement would come out with a golden ale.

Born in a microbrewery at the Guinness brewery in Dublin, the Golden Ale pours crystal clear and sunset-amber, with an exuberantly cloudy head that did slightly collapse in on itself. There’s a lot of fruit on the nose, which makes its initial dryness even more surprising – this is a malty, biscuity dryness rather than a hoppy one. Speaking as someone whose palate is regularly blown by IIPAs and nuclear saisons, Guinness’ Golden Ale – by virtue of its extreme lightness – tasted to me honeyed and sweetly light, weirdly not unlike the Kolsch I sampled in Cologne recently.

Spookily, something in this beer did remind me of Guinness’ trademark stout. The Golden Ale is brewed with Guinness yeast, but I doubt I could tell one yeast strain from another if it walked up and gave me its business card, so this association could be down to a: reading the press release a lot and b: obstinately drinking it out of a Guinness glass for kicks. Nevertheless, like many beer drinkers, I have a special place in my heart for Guinness – its Dublin HQ was the first brewery I visited, it was my major source of vitamin intake throughout university – so it was nice to get a heady whiff of something so familiar.

Brewer Peter Simpson said this was intended to be a balanced beer “that would appeal to a broad range of people”. I’d agree with that – at 4.5% abv, I could imagine happily drinking pint after pint of this with a Sunday roast. Ideally outside in a sunny pub garden. But it’s a session, not an event, ale; it’s polite, to hop-bomb pales like Kernel and BrewDog what Guinness’ stout is to a bottled-black hole from Mikkeler.

Renowned for their stout, Guinness was always going to fall foul of the seasons among those drinkers who wouldn’t touch a dark beer after the 30 May. This Pale is a truly respectable shapeshift onto the premium ale market – starkly different (in colour alone) but true to its roots. For a company that’s largely been brewing the same beer for 256 years, that’s not bad going.

At a glance:

Guinness Golden Ale
4.5% abv

Drink: with food, sunshine, reckless abandon; if you’re a fan of other Golden Ales like Fullers’ Honeydew

Available in selected pubs and shops

ICIP was sent two bottles of Guinness Golden Ale to sample