For me honey beer is a pretty hard beer to get right, If you say a beer has honey in, it needs to taste of honey but not be overly sweet and still taste like beer, rather than drinking a pint of sweet malty water or not being able to taste the honey.
For me Hiver gets this just about right, as soon as I opened the bottle I could smell the honey, although this did worry me that they may have over done the honey. Fortunately they hadn’t the base beer is a simple pale ale with enough of a dry grassy hop character to offset the sweetness of the honey.
While it’s not the most amazing beer in the world it’s probably the strongest honey tasting beer I’ve had so it’s definitely worth a thumbs up and something that I could happily drink a couple of chilled bottles of.
The branding and back story is pretty cool and the little PR gimmick of the seed bomb with bee friendly flower seeds in was pretty neat too.
Check out more at http://www.hiverbeers.com/
Have to say that my opinion when I tried this ale was exactly the same. A real honey nose promised an overly sweet beer but I was pleased to find a crisp bite to the underlying beer and as you say, a proper balance. Hiver have since brought another version, Honey Ale as opposed to Honey Beer. This one is a darker ale and for me, a little too sweet. We have a soft spot for Hiver beers, they may be brewed in London but their founder is actually from our home town of Hull in East Yorkshire.