The Brutal Truth: Savvas's Northern English Brown

This is the competitor:

Hard to tell from the photo alone, but that's a Northern English Brown, so says Savvas.. let's see about that.  ;)

Appearance: Initial appearance shows a dark brown liquid that canot be seen through at normal room lighting conditions. When jacklighted with my trusty maglight, it shows a crystal clear mahogany color thats awesome to see. Style guide wants to see dark amber to red/brown, so I'll give him that. Dinged only for no real head appearance on this beer. 2/3

Aroma: I'm getting an initial sweet caramel thing here, but in the background a high pitched sorta hoppy thing comes through. It's fleeting and get's squashed by the sweetness pretty quick, but its there. That's pretty much the definition of the NEB, so.. hey, good for you. On second glance, I'm sensing almost a microscopic roast note in here, too.. appealing. However, for style, I think it's a little heavy on the caramel and esters are readily apparent, where for style they are allowed, but should be restrained. But still, it's darned tasty..  8/12

Flavor: says hops. Mild, but apparent. A bit of a tangy flavor in here.. from the hops, nothing bad. Beer is a bit too cold right now, gotta rest this a bit and let it warm up.. I'll come back in a sec. After a sec: ah, yes! Quite fine. Nice beer. Seems to hit a lot of the right notes for this style.. I'm liking it. 16/20

Mouthfeel: I'll go medium body for this beer. It's pretty smack in the middle of 'just right'. I'm thinking it's a bit on the light side of carbonation, but I was warned about that ahead of time. Still, nothing wrong with where it's at.. could just stand a pinch more is all. Maybe that's just the high carbed American in me talking, though.. and holy crap, but am I sensing diacetyl here, or is that just me?? 3/5

Overall Impression: They say 'nutty' is the characteristic you're looking for in this beer.. I still get a more deep sweet, caramel thing here than nutty. It's still quite fine, but the nutty party is missing.. which is saying a lot, considering how nutty the brewer is. Oh snap! Still, I'll go so far as to give an 7/10 here.

That's only a 36 out of a possible 50 points, but man.. the whole seems greater than the sum of the components. I really wanna go back and re-figure the numbers to push this a bit higher, but I'm not sure that's the right thing to do. I wanna see this beer a bit less caramel-ly and a scosche more nutty, whatever that means. For a brown ale, I'm thinking it should have a bit more brown in it, rather than Red beer, you know what I'm sayin'? But I'm not an Englishman, and I guess my score will hve to stand, although I feel it should be more of a 38 than a 36. What a bastard!