Results tagged “Wychwood” from An English Epicure

This one is a Christmas special from the Wychwood brewery. They call it a “seasonal brew with plum and spice” but we all know it’s just a marketing ploy to cash in on the primary gifting period.

It has a rich malt aroma and it tastes of Christmas. Either that or an average dark ale with a hint of spiced fruit. Well, “average” may be a bit too harsh (it is a nice ale) but it isn’t really anything special. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a Christmas special, which is exactly what I wanted when I chose it. Hooray.

It has goblins with a Christmas pudding on the label and it’s 5.0% ABV.

This is a lovely, dark beer brewed by the Wychwood Brewery in Oxfordshire. It is 5.2% ABV.

It is made with roasted malts which give it a deep, strong flavour, set off nicely by a hint of bitter hops. This is a powerfully flavoured beer for sipping. Well, for drinking relatively slowly anyway. I know what I mean.

I suppose the flavour isn’t really very interesting. It’s just one, strong flavour on its own. But it is a good flavour and I like the depth and strength. As you might have guessed from my other tasting notes, I am not a big fan of very bitter beers. I do like some very hoppy beers (for instance, the new generation of American IPAs are really rather good) but more often than not I find astringently bitter beers boring and not that pleasant. I like my hops to balance or accentuate the real flavour of the beer, which (in most cases) comes from the malt, rather than to stand out on their own, which I find tends to result in an unpleasant aftertaste. So I like the fact that the hops in this beer are noticeable but only as a sort of defining edge to the thick, roasted malt flavour.

I don’t know if I’m pretentious or just very bad at expressing flavours in words. Probably both.

The variety of hops is not mentioned on the bottle but rumour has it that Styrian Goldings and Fuggles hops are used. Styrian Golding is a seedless clone of Fuggles, apparently.

Osprey is a dark ale brewed by the Wychwood brewery from Northdown and Goldings hops. It is 6.5% ABV.

Apparently it is “Brewed exclusively for Sainsbury’s” so you will have to brave the hideous shiny supermarket if you want a bottle of this stuff. If I were you, I wouldn’t bother. It claims to be “strong and rich” but I was disappointed. It is pleasant but I was expecting more. I was expecting something dark and rich but it’s actually fairly bland and uninteresting. It’s not bad, it’s just not very good either. It also has quite a bitter aftertaste, so I wouldn’t want more than one pint in a row.