Today's Beer
Name – Canberra
Brewer – Windsor & Eton
Classification
– Commonwealth Ale (Confused? Read on...)
Strength – 4.0%
ABV
Verdict - At
A Glance
On the eye
– Deep, lustrous chestnut. Like some gloriously implausible rum and molasses
cocktail.
On the nose
– Good God! Big hops with equal treacle (which should be a band name)
underscored with delicious smoky liquorice (which definitely should not be a band name).
On the tongue
– Rich, rewarding and complex with fabulously zesty hops, all kinds of
complimentary sub-flavours and an overall punch far greater than its strength
ought to allow.
On the subject
– This is the final beer of three brewed by Windsor & Eton to commemorate ‘Jubilee
2012’, and it’s arguable they've saved the very best for last. (See one of them reviewed here, and trust me that the other was totally ace.)
On the market
– Another ‘grab it while you can’ beer arrives on The Bottled Beer Year, with the safest bet of doing so being to purchase from the brewery direct.
On the whole – 9/10
Full Review
As the inevitable 'end of
year reviews' begin to clog up every last media outlet over the coming weeks,
much will be said about what has been (in any UK-linked territory at least) the
50th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s time spent having to shake
hands with unwell, poorly paid taxpayers – otherwise known as The Diamond Jubilee.
What might not be mentioned during
all this dewy-eyed hullabaloo – not nearly as much as it should be, at least – is the relatively small contribution made to
these festivities by a certain UK brewery, in the form of three enormously
lovely (and even more enormously diverse)
commemorative beers.
Long before this year-long national
party had started, the magicians at Windsor
& Eton had been quietly impressing me and thousands of other ale fundamentalists with an ever
growing roster of astonishing beers, each of which manages to combine cutting
edge characteristics and flavour themes with an equally immediate sense of tradition
– an elusive little trick which few other breweries ever quite manage to pull
off.
Uniquely, Canberra is called a ‘Commonwealth Ale’, and whilst that’s
probably just the brewery entering into the spirit of their own idea and having
a bit of fun with the royal theme, it’s also perfectly fitting that they should
essentially invent an entirely new beer style for this brew because in my experience
there just ain’t nothing like it currently
available on the open market.
From the moment of contact
with the lips this stuff begins racing around the full flavour spectrum like
the proverbial bat out of Berkshire, and before you can properly identify any
specific notes – it’s already begun firing barrages of new tastes at you as
though it genuinely intends to kill you.
And this pleasantly aggressive
characteristic is one of the things that most impresses about Canberra. After you remind yourself of the
relatively benign alcohol content (4.0% ABV), you
realise it beggars belief how they've managed to empower this drink with such a
wealth of robust flavours as well as its almost menacing sense of inner might.
Specifically, the flavours at
play here are spiced orange citrus, ginger cake, green figs, fennel, restrained
cocoa, delicate traces of maple syrup – and the malts underpin all of this with
a super-unique roasted nut, char-grilled tree sap kind of a twang which,
frankly, leaves you wanting to sit the hell down and contemplate the inside
of your own mouth for a good old while.
This really is a genuinely
dynamic and hugely rewarding concoction.
All in all, this three beer
salute to the British monarch has been imbued with a majesty every bit as grand
as the one it was intended to reflect. The only difference being that this Windsor
brewery has taken just a few short years to generate the same glorious heritage which
a certain other local resident needed half a century to acquire.