Melton Red
Belvoir Brewery Ltd

 

500ml Bottle: best before Sep 2013. Poured at home into a UK pint sleeve glass.

Reddy amber body, bright almost: off-white head of thin foam on top.

Malts rule this brew: roasted, toasted malts to be exact. Fairly sweet tasting beer with a fuity feel to the malt molasses, toffee notes can clearly be found within the malty flavour.

Crisp and well carbonated, easy to drink and interesting.

This beer certainly hasn't retired. It's the bottled version of the Beaver Bitter (please note that Belvoir is pronounced Beaver) and bottled professionally.Colin the brewer was once at Theakston's and the beer was inspired by the old XB as it was before the accountants had their say.
Being a bottled version of a cask beer it is of course dumbed down but I must judge it on its own merits.The use of top quality malt and hops gives it a lot of bang for the ABV. It's a beautifully balanced bitter (not an ESB, it's a premium bitter), there's a lovely belt of clean malt perfectly offset by a more than average bitterness.Lovely malty aftertaste which remains for a long while.
I definitely recommend the cask version though.

Pours pale amber with a thin but trailing white head. Nose of prune and port. Malts rule: raisin, pumpernickel, and treacle, with anise and celery hops. Coats the mouth for a clingy finish. Light to medium body.

A malt bomb for the style; especially for the color or body. Could use better balance to be more drinkable.

Note: Second tasting drank much lighter, with red grapefruit hops to close.

500 ml brown bottle, courtesy of Cardinal pub, Stavanger. ABV is 4.3%. This beer is apparently named after the original idea of "painting the town red" (see label). Listen, taggers and other vandals: it might have seemed funny the first time, but it’s not funny any more!
The beer is more brown than red, slightly hazy, and pours with a moderate to low head. Are you sure this beer is not bottle conditioned? It is definitely not retired! Moderate carbonation, soft mouthfeel. Pleasant aroma of malts, earth, caramel, blackcurrant leaves and dark fruits. Flavour is perfectly balanced between the malts and hops, not too sweet, despite some caramel in the background - no off-flavours here: Melton Red tastes like BEER, and a damn good one too!

Purchased at the Nelson Wines beer shop, South Wimbledon. BBE OCT 2007, and I don't think this beer has retired anyway. Served cool in a straight imperial pint glass.

A: bright chestnut brown-ish colour, coming with a creamy off-white beer head that sustains with some determination; the body is very gently carbonated. From the appearance and that no yeast sediments are left in the bottle, I beg to differ from the previous reviewer, that this beer is filtered and not bottle-conditioned.
S: enticingly fruity and richly malty--the rich, slightly sticky fruitiness as of longan-fruits+raisins are complemented nicely by a rather rich, but not intrusive, maltiness like caramelised brown sugar and sticky chestnuts, while a light touch of fruity hops stays quietly in the corner. Very smooth and attractive.
T: a light-bodied malty palate doesn't make a big entrance, but is quickly taken over by a roast tea-leafy bitterness accompanied by plenty of caramelised-sugary malts, mild bitter-sweet flavour of longan-fruit tea plus roast nuts; a slightly tangy and tongue-shatteringly bitter impact goes deep in no time... overwhelming the whole palate and resulting in a herbal-tea-ish aftertaste very much like fully-fermented, roast black tea from South-West China--chewy, satisfyingly bitter and quite dryish, tea-leafy aromatic, and subtly but lingeringly roasty in the long finish...
M&D: slightly thin-bodied on the balance, but the ending touch of bitterness makes up for it; in a sense I've rarely encountered a Premium Bitter such bitter and dry as this one, but I do fall for it for this very reason. A thirst-provoking bitter really worth a try!

Bottle-conditioned. Label says it's brewed to honor how the town of Melton Mowbray was painted red. Literally. So it really happened?

A reddish toasty color with off-white head barely tinged with amber.

Buttery toasted almond aroma.

More toasted nuts on the tongue, almonds and hazelnuts swirled in light butterscotch.

Medium body, very pleasing. (If you like that sort of thing, which I do!)