Steelers
Warcop

I was lucky to find three Warcop beers at the UTOBEER beer shop in the Borough Market, London. The beer label mentions that this beer is "conditioned and stored in casks for at least 2 months before being bottled in the old fashioned hand bottling process"... Bottle-conditioned in a slim 500ml brown bottle. BB 31/12/2006.

A: light ruby hue with brownish hint, loosely-formed spongey beer head slowly settling down, leaving tight lacing along the way; medium-carbonated, with tiny bubbles ascending and larger ones ejecting upwards.
S: astringent fruitiness (mildly orange and mildly pineapple) and refreshing malts upfront, overwhelmed soon by piney, gingery-spicy, wild yeast’s musty, woody and slightly wet-cardboard paper’s oxidised odour. Overall the smell is very astringent, not to the point of being unpleasant but, at best, shows average quality.
T: intense and sharply textured malts with strong nutty and piney edge hits the palate, a little caramel hint to follow; quickly giving way to a flatly-textured, earthy bitterness imparted with a very faint tinge of leafy hops, like Goldings(?).
M: the sharp mouthfeel is fed by lots of unsettled carbonation, hence overall fizzy and not pleasant for a bitter. Judging from the flavour profile I could imagine a cask-conditioned version might well be mellower and more like a mildly spicy and malty bitter, which the bottled one fails to live up to.
D: overall this is a medium-bodied beer off the balance, with huge promise from its stress of tradition but the end result in the bottle is desperately in need of more time or maturation to reach a harmonious state.