M&S Christmas Ale
The Great Yorkshire Brewery

M&S Christmas AleM&S Christmas Ale
Beer Geek Stats
From:
The Great Yorkshire Brewery
 
England, United Kingdom
Style:
Winter Warmer
ABV:
6.2%
Score:
Needs more ratings
Avg:
2.9 | pDev: 4.83%
Reviews:
3
Ratings:
3
Status:
Active
Rated:
Dec 25, 2009
Added:
Feb 21, 2009
Wants:
  0
Gots:
  0
No description / notes.
Recent ratings and reviews.
Photo of soulgrowl
Reviewed by soulgrowl from England

3.1/5  rDev +6.9%
look: 3 | smell: 3 | taste: 3 | feel: 4 | overall: 3
Pours a dark teak, laced with a vanilla head. It looks like beer but smells more like mulled wine - orange and cinnamon pop from every bubble, while more subdued aromas of nutmeg, tea, and lime lurk in the shadows. A poorly integrated star anise character calls to mind Cantonese duck. The taste finds a powdery blend of Christmas spices adrift in a vacuum of flavor. There isn't really anything here except a thin wallpapering of brown sugar and caramel to anchor the cinnamon and clove. Shame there isn't a bit more going on in this beer, because the spices are nice and it comes so close to being something special.
Dec 25, 2009
Photo of DerBayer
Reviewed by DerBayer from Germany

2.83/5  rDev -2.4%
look: 3.5 | smell: 3 | taste: 2.5 | feel: 3 | overall: 3
Hmmm This beer looked kind of cool on the shelf and I have not had many winter warmers but heard good things about them - never had a particularly good one though.

I was hoping that this could be the first great one but I was being disappointed an the beer was jsut about mediocre because it had a nice warming taste of spice to it that I like in a winter beer...
Nov 29, 2009
Photo of wl0307
Reviewed by wl0307 from England

2.78/5  rDev -4.1%
look: 3.5 | smell: 3 | taste: 2.5 | feel: 3.5 | overall: 2.5
Purchased at the Marks & Spencer's, this RAIB is new on the shelf but I suspect it only replaces the previous filtered version of M&S Christmas Ale. That forbearer was way too sweet and heavy on the flavour of spice extracts; let's see how this one fares. BB 06/2009, served lightly chilled in Hapkin's tulip-shaped bowl sniffer.

A: russet brown with ruby hues, creamy beige froth with great retention, on top of light carbonation.
S: quite mixed and slightly pungent in the citrus-peel department - the blend has the citrus-peel preceding savoury notes of yeasts, wood-dust, leather, nutmeg, clove and cinnamon (like the beer label indicates), leaving the damp yeastiness, plum-ish fruity hops behind and malts are almost nowhere to be found. Unbalanced, the aroma rings a bell of some festive-seasonal soap actually, and the sour edge from both lemon extracts as well as yeast-sediments is OTT.
T: surprisingly, the foretaste is neither so spicy nor sweet as the nose suggests - a really softly-carbonated mouthful of pungent, acidic-bitter dried citrus peels and lemon juice makes a big entrance, but soon settles to a tangy, nutmeg-ish spicy and salty undertones underlined by random presence of earthy bitterness. More sour oxidised plums, sour grapes and bitter dried citrus-peels stay put, before hitting a dry-ish finish like ground root-herbs.
M&D: although the palate remains fresh (witness to decent bottle-conditioning), the yeast sediments do constitute an obstacle to the overall, potentially-pleasant flavour (well, bad bottle-conditioning then....). The thin-ish body is no good news for the overall performance, and malts are too weak to provide some kind of a backbone to balance off the high-level acidity. This new product is not so sweet and fizzy as the old M&S X'mas beer, but the flavour profile would certainly need further experiment to be put right. Too expensive (2.69 quid a bottle!).
Feb 21, 2009
M&S Christmas Ale from The Great Yorkshire Brewery
Beer rating: 2.9 out of 5 with 3 ratings