Christmas Ale
Felstar Brewery & Felstead Vineyard

 

Purchased at the OnlyFineBeer shop, Chelmsford. This bottle-conditioned beer comes in a 500ml brown glass bottle, with an old-school X'mas greeting-card like beer label, featuring a merry and amiable Santa-Claus ringing bells in front of a candle-light decorated X'mas tree... a bit schmeltzy to my taste. BB Dec. 06, served cool in a jug.

A: pours an extremely dark brownish hue mixed with white bits of yeast sediments; the tan beer head, about 1cm thick, comes slowly effervescent but very tightly foamy, sustaining throughout the drink like a perfectly-aerated cappuccino froth, thanks to a hyper, highly-carbonated body.
S: a balanced aroma with equal entries of dark malts and aromatic+flowery hops (like American hop varieties, as in "Good Knight" by the same brewery...): a subtly lychee-like tartly-sweet fruity note combines with a flowery hoppy scent, floating above a creamy stream of sweet-coffee like roasted malts with a mildly sour-bitter tail, underlined by a licorice-like herbal scent and a chewy, rawish malt-grist like dark malty body firmly underneath. Well-executed and reasonably complex for a robust stout--not simply roasty or overly malty.
T: a nutmeg+clove-like spicy and slightly pine-woody yeasty edge skirts around a rounded main body of roast and crystal malts, turning slightly dryish-bitter at a slow pace and rather tangy here and there; the aromatic hoppyness quietly develops at the back along with a mild fruity hint of juniper-berries, serving as a balancer to arrive at a rather clean and soft palate overall. Medium-lenth aftertaste, with faint traces of roastiness to chew at the back of the palate.
M&D: medium-bodied at most for such a robust and flavoursome stout; the texture is softly-fizzy throughout, but the ending touch falls slightly thin thus fails to hold the overall body faultlessly. An X'mas Stout it's brewed to be (according to the brewery), and a robust wintery dark ale it gets in this bottle, with a nice balance b/w bitter malts and pleasant edges of fruits and spices. Very enjoyable, even now in the summer time~~