Wapping Magna 800
Wapping Beers Ltd.

This bottle-conditioned ale is brewed using "American pale ale yeast & Liberty hops". Coming in a 500ml brown glass bottle, BB 28/02/2008, served cool in a straight imperial pint glass.

A: translucent dark-yellowish to light-golden in colour, coming with a rather restrained carbonation and fast-settling white foamy head; not as lively as its award-winning sister product, Baltic Gold, but tiny carbonation is detected.
S: a raw-ish note of roughly-gristy pale malts comes with a touch of minerals, leather, and hints of white chocolates also... A swirl brings out a stinky note of dried leafy hops in support of a lighter layer of tart-citric hoppiness. More interesting than attractive.
T: like Baltic Gold, an assertively stinky edge of hops dominates the flavour, on top of tannic-textured dried citrus-peels and lightly salty-sweet dried crataegus-fruits; at the back, a licorice-root like dryish-sweetness (from gristy malts and yeasts I guess) is added to the tannic hoppiness, resulting in a most interesting mouthfeel that is chewy, citric-zesty, yeasty as well as powdery sweet. Alas, a preferable gravity from bitterness is in the lacking, thus the aftertaste is almost like "floating" in the throat.
M&D: a bit "tired" the mouthfeel is, without sufficient effervescence to liven up the overall texture; instead, the palate remains lubricating, almost too smooth for this type of Blond Bitter. Overall, the equation on the palate b/w hops, malts and yeasts is just not right in this bottle-conditioned beer. True, the cask version that I've tried at the Baltic Fleet brewpub is lighter and crispier, yet that is less interesting than this somewhat "defunct" version from a bottle...