This was a very pleasant surprise.
I have no idea why I wasn’t expecting much from this bottle, but I wasn’t.
But it poured a deep dark brown with a lovely fluffy head and the smell was all prunes and wood and damp cardboard.
The malting here is big and bold, full of burned toast, treacle, black coffee and bitter damsons, and the hops are hazel leaves and grass clippings.
There’s some thick dark chocolate in here too which gets snapped away from you by a very dry, very bitter, very crisp finish.
I like this very much, but stone the crows someone needs to do some copy editing on the labels.
I’ve asked this several times before, but why is it that breweries seem to be really lazy about getting their copy right?
I mean, “Please note that this is a real ale product and therefore they may be a small amount of sediment in the bottle and care should be taken when pouring into a glass.”
Apart from being a terribly constructed sentence, “they may” is an appalling GCSE mistake.
Nice beer though.

Source: Best Of British Beer