Nut ‘n Honey Porter
Elbeck Brews

650ml bottle (once again, with a rather dear price for a locally-produced brew). Apparently this is the first 'dark' beer that this homebrewer turned pro ever made.

This beer pours a clear, dark orange-brick brown colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, finely foamy, and somewhat fizzy beige head, which leaves some tiered streaky and sudsy lace around the glass as it slowly ebbs away.

It smells of lightly roasted caramel malt, a touch of biscuity toffee, honeyed nuts (or nutty honey, take yer pick), a bit of Mars Bar nougaty sweetness, and very little else. The taste is bready and doughy caramel malt, a hint of free-range ashiness, field honey, some pithy nuttiness, a mild earthy spiciness, and very tame musty, weedy, and dead floral hop bitters.

The carbonation is fairly active in its palate-coating frothiness, the body a decent medium weight, and mostly smooth, with nothing really existant here that might make any sort of fuss. It finishes off-dry, the nutty and caramelized malts holding fast as the muddled spicy and hoppy notes fade off into that good night.

Overall, this is a pleasant enough flavoured Porter, with the nuts and honey not overplaying their guest hands, as it were. Easy to drink, and yet hard to swallow, in the sense of the previously mentioned shelf tag measure, which makes me not all that ready to procure another anytime soon.