First published in BEER September 2007.
ABV: 5 per cent
Origin: Maldon, Essex, England
Website www.maldonbrewing.co.uk
Farmer's Ales (Maldon) Golden Boar
The Golden Boars were flying off the shelf at the Little Beer Shop just outside Norwich a couple of months back. While I nerdily checked my wants list I noticed two obviously regular customers back for repeat orders, and the manager couldn’t sing the beer’s praises too highly. So I squeezed in a bottle and was delighted to discover they weren’t wrong: this is a boar that lives up to its precious colour.
Farmer’s Ales, opened in 2002 and also known as the Maldon Brewery, is based in the stable block of the Blue Boar Hotel in Maldon, a pretty town on Essex’s Blackwater estuary, on the edge of Eastern England’s microbrewing hotbed.
Head brewer Charles Saville formerly worked at nearby Crouch Vale, and admits to the influence of that brewery’s seasonal Amarillo when devising Golden Boar as a cask ale for the Pig’s Ear Beer Festival in east London. But while the Crouch Vale brew uses eponymous Amarillo hops, the Boar uses “loads” of another North American variety, Cascade, alongside pale and amber malts. The brewery’s Chris Farmer says there’s a further ingredient but the brewers refuse to tell her what it is!
The Real Ale in a Bottle version is hand bottled and hand labelled at the brewery, and comes out a slightly hazy deep gold with a thick off-white head. Those “loads” of hops come over clearly in a flowery pineapple aroma – you can almost see the resin oozing out of a freshly squeezed cone.
The toasty, biscuity, creamy textured palate is bursting with bright and cheerful flavours: citric fruit, more flowers, rooty hops, fresh yeastiness and a detectable coloured malt note. The finish is equally flavourful and complex, with seedy peppery-bitter hops and herbal flavours over juicy sweet malt, and a not unpleasant whiff of burnt rubber.
As the choice of Real Ales in a Bottle from British craft brewers continues to expand, it sometimes seems difficult for new beers to make a distinctive and memorable impression. But every so often you’re awestruck by the fact that a simple combination of malt, hops and water can produce something so sublime, especially when virtually hand made in a pub shed. Golden Boar gave me one of those moments and is well worth grubbing up.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/farmers-ales-golden-boar/77026/
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