Farriers' Beer
Shoes Brewery

33cl bottle from The Beer Emporium, Sandbach. This particular batch shows as 14.7% The beer poured a pale golden colour. aroma was of sherry/wine/alcohol. The alcohol was strong in the background although a good sherry taste was prominent. Typical strong complex barley wine style taste but with something like pale sherry flavours. Smooth and chewy in the mouth,little carbonation, this is not an ale to dismiss immediately. It took several sips to appreciate the feel and taste. I believe this ale would be better matured at least a year in the bottle to be fully appreciated. A beer I would try again.

Got this bottle at the OnlyFineBeer shop in Chelmsford. As far as I could remember, this is perhaps the strongest beer that I've ever come across. Now is the moment to consume this special ale since I've finished another chapter of my thesis just now... Coming in a slim, 330ml brown bottle, bottle-conditioned, with no freshness info. printed on the bottle or label. Served cool in a large Burgundy bulb wine glass.

A: pours a dark ruby hue with brownish hints, coming with no beer head and no visible carbonation at all, which is pretty normal for an extremely high-gravity beer.
S: very strong and dense maltiness, alc., and sugar overwhelm the aroma... skirted by pronounced sour-sweet dried fruits like sweet dates, plums, apples, and a touch of alc.-soaked cherry-skins. But overall the aroma is quieter than settled, as it's submerged in that strong wave of alc. Off balance.
T: the texture is very light upfront, but quickly followed by absolutely hot-ish/alcoholic maltiness along with an edge of sour-sweet fruitiness like apple+plum-liquor and prune-juice plus a touch of raisins... the alc. is omnipresent, creeping from the sides of the tongue down the throat, yet clearly a sour-sweet edge of dried fruits constantly stays behind, and so does a dryish mouthfeel presumably coming from hops that turns drier and drier deeply on the tongue... leaving a rather sour and dry finishing touch in the end, very much like that of prunes.
M&D: very flat and even watery on the mouthfeel... this super strong beer somehow has lost the plot, as if it were to attain something of a divine order without bothering what's to be sacrificed along the way. In its case, a healthy malt-hop balance and flavour are certainly the victims... While it's by no means a bad beer--judging from how potent it aspires to be, the efforts are somehow lost in translation.