Curious Brew Admiral Porter
Hepworth & Co. (Brewers) Ltd.

 

The colour is black. If you look carefully, you can se a slight wine red tint. The liquid is clear. The brown finger thick head is airy. No lacing.

The smell is wine-like and oak matured. There are sweet notes and lots of roasted malt. There is also a neutral bitterness.

The taste is not very balanced: Roasted dry malts with a hint of sweetness meets a passing flavour of odd chemical hops (plastic, rubber). The aftertaste is pretty light with a neutral bitterness and some roasted notes.

The mouthfeel is light with a quite strong carbonation.

Another contract-brew by the Hepworth brewery for the Chapel Down Winery in East Sussex. The beer label states this porter uses bittering hop from the Sussex grown Admiral with a small amount of Goldings late hops, and is matured with oak. Bottle-conditioned, it comes in a slim 33cl brown bottle. BB 22/10/06, served cool in a broad-rimmed goblet.

A: mahogany with ruby glows; a beige-hued beer head dissipates, leaving a thin layer on top of a settled body with very gentle fizziness.
S: interesting--a lightly roasty edge of dark malts is backed with tobacco-like smokiness/char, subtle vanilla and chocolatey hints of old oak-barrels, bitter cocoa, a winey sour-sweet hint of berry-fruits and smoked prunes (like Harvey's Imperial Stout)... reaching a nice balance b/w bitterness-sweetness-sourness, with a "floating", cigarette-like smokey note threading through all elements. Distinctive and nice--the oak-barrels used to age this beer were definitely used on red wines, dare I say.
T: the rather light roasty/smoky flavour of black/crystal malts is buttressed by a delicate vanilla and chocolatey hint as from old French barrels, with a twist of Syrah grape's characters--esp. spiciness and raspberries (maybe the oak-barrels were indeed used to age Syrah wines?!); quietly, a subtle sour-bitterness from very dark chocolates develops at the back, leading to a vanilla-oaky+char, dryish yet aromatic-mouthfeel attached to the deep end of the tongue, where lingering bitterness and licorice-hints are balanced by an underlying sour fruity edge... lovely...
M&D: medium-bodied for a 5.0%abv. porter and the mouthfeel is ever so creamy-soft yet refreshing due to fine carbonation; its taste is just like the aroma, with considerable inputs from oak-ageing. I'm not familiar with this "style", i.e. "oak-aged porter", but Innis&Gunn's whisky-barrel-aged pale ale has indeed prepared me for the distinctive experience I hereby encounter from this little gem. My palate craves for bolder and bigger malty flavours as in normal English porters, but this interpretation goes an extra mile to achieve something that could perhaps push the envelop further in the relatively conservative British beer scene, in the same fashion as Innis&Gunn's pioneering efforts on pale ales. Applause to the Chapel Down Winery and Hepworth Brewery!