Here’s something I’ve rarely been called: an English rose.  It is a name that runs in my family, though.  My grandmother was a Rose; my mother’s middle name, Rose.  In honest truth, I’m not sure the conventional meaning of the description would have applied to either of them.  I never knew my grandmother, but from old sepia photos I have seen of her, she would only have been likened to a rose at the stage it had withered on the stem.  And my mum a rose?  I rather think of her more like a tulip.  Cheekier and more flirtatious, rather than exhibiting a rose’s inherent respectability.

And why should these comparisons be on my mind?  Through drinking a pint of Milestone’s English Rose.  A 4.5% ABV red ale.  It has a nice deep red colour and a good head, like an English rose, but in taste it reminds me of an English rose no more than did my mother or my grandmother before her.  The flavour is more treacly than fruity; quite powerful in comparison to a rose’s subtlety.  Not unpleasant, just maybe not what I expected.

However, I am grateful to my pint of English Rose for giving me a moment to reminisce about my mother and my grandmother.  Drinking, pubs, beer: they are intimately linked to both national and personal heritage and history.

In a world of increasingly sparrow-length memories, it is important to remember where you come from.

© Beery Sue

Beery Sue: a rose, by any other name.