Being a well-adjusted and sensible person, after a mildly frustrating and difficult day at work I decided the best idea was alcohol. Preferably beer. So I visited one of Nottingham’s five-hundred branches of the Evil Tesco Empire in order to select the cause for tomorrow’s potential hangover.

The trouble with real ales in Tesco is they put my favourite one on the top shelf, meaning I can only reach it when it is right at the front. I’d ask a member of staff but they are less helpful than infected anal cysts. I managed to get three bottles of one of my favourites Wychwood’s Wychcraft, a rather delightful blond beer. I decided to get a bottle of something new, that I had not tried before due my inability to reach another bottle of Wychcraft.

I remembered some time recently Warren Ellis posted a rather favourable review of Brew Dog’s ‘Punk IPA’ and decided to take the advice. I wish I hadn’t…

On first taste Punk IPA is reminiscent of licking a burnt plastic toilet seat in a dilapidated pub in Tottenham, the only thing missing is the pubic hair and “Arsnal is a qweer” scrawled in human excrement on a nearby wall. This was followed by a slightly soapy aftertaste, but not good soap. That soap they had in primary schools in the 1980s that sort of split as it was used and got dirt in the cracks, making it look like you’d get your hands dirtier from touching it. Probably after you’d bet someone 50p to put it up their bum and then put it back on the sink.

I sat for a moment wondering if it had been named ‘Punk IPA’ because it was supposed to taste like licking the ‘biffin’s bridge’ of gutter punk crackheads with dysentery but decided not to be so dismissive and carried on, maybe it would grow on me (like a cancerous melanoma on my left bollock, perhaps).

The next mouthful was a little more conventional, it is very oaky and has an acid bitterness that just does not appeal to me, it might be fruity if this acidity and strong bitterness did not take all traces of other flavours, nail them to a tree and burn them on the nipples with cheap cigarettes until they gave in and agreed to surrender. If you find different overpowering flavours waging chemical warfare in your mouth appealing, this may be the ale for you. Be warned, though. They do not follow the Geneva convention.

The aftertaste really started to kick in now, about as subtly as PCP kicks in when taken by an eight year old girl with ADHD. It had strong notes of wet dog and antiseptic ointment at this stage.

It could be worse, it was only ‘regular wet dog’ rather than ‘fell-in-a-stagnant-reservoir-on-an-August-evening wet dog’. Just like a happy family pet that had been rained on, and had then raped you in the face using a cheap supermarket own-brand germaline copy for lubrication.

This ale should be sealed in concrete, encased in lead and buried five miles below sea level in the salt flats of Utah. You’d still taste the fucking thing within a five mile radius, such is the overpowering evil contained within the bottle.

3/10*

*Nothing can get lower than three whilst Tesco Value Lager and Carling exist.