Shipstone’s Crew Fine Amber Ale is another one of Aldi Supermarkets great beer lines and is sold in 330ml bottles either in 6 packs or slabs of 24. This 5.0 alc/vol ale is very nutty and somewhat fruity and has great taste with some real delecate flavors and great value at a fraction of the cost of a similar beer with a known name.  The beer is brewed using  super alpha hops which leaves the beer with a nice bitterness complementing the fruit and malt. The beer we get in Australia Aldi Supermarkets is sourced from New Zealand, and i’m not sure if a similar product is sold in Aldi stores around the world- we would love to hear from you if you know.

Check this fun video out its a couple of guys giving tribute to their favorite Christmas beer- Great Lakes Brewing Company’s Christmas Ale.  Great Lakes Brewing comes from Cleveland Ohio and have brewing great beers for about 20 years. They are Ohio’s most celebrated and award winning brewer- and looking at the passion of these guys in the video they must make a great beer.  Their Christmas Ale is available during November and December, it has a robust spicy style with honey ginger and cinnamon added to the recipe. The beer has a 7.7 alcohol volume and has won quiet a few gold medals at the World Beer Championships, 1999, 2006, 2005 and 2007. Its a great beer for the cold North American Christmas and goes great with all those rich Chrissy foods of the season.  See if you can get your hands on some for Christmas- as the final worlds in the song say it all…”In a few short weeks it will all be gone”

For more information; http://www.greatlakesbrewing.com

Wexford Irish Creme Ale is another product from the Green King using authentic Irish malts and hops dating back to a 1810 recipe. The beer is very smooth with a tasty caramel taste and as the name suggests is very creamy. The can features a widget, a small ping pong ball like device which releases nitrogen into the beer when the can is opened to give the beer a live taste like straight out of a draught tap. Quiet a few of the English and Irish ales and stouts use a similar idea, ball shaped and others with very high tech fins and flaps. We will do a story on widgets in coming weeks. The beer probably isn’t a beer you would want to drink year round, it is more a winter beer and goes great with rich hot foods like roasts and casseroles rich with gravy and roasted veg. delicious!

The native Australian Pepperberry is a bush spice which has a distinct pepper zing and is the special ingredient in James Boag’s latest seasonal release for the Australian Winter. The berry has been used by the Australian Aborigines for centuries and is not only a tasty bush tucker it has some medicinal qualities, today it is used in gourmet jams, chutneys and the like. The beer called the James Squire Pepperberry Winter Ale this beer is sure to please the beer drinker looking for something luxurious and a bit special. The beer is as you would guess fairly spicy, it has a medium caramel flavor with hints of chocolate and toffee. The pepperberry gives it a hot and interesting taste. Being an ale the beer is not short of flavour and is a perfect match for a rich winter roast or some tasty chocolate pudding. Look out for it in your Australian bottleshops, but hurry it is a strictly limited release and if my local bottleshop is any indication, it won’t stay on the shelves for too long.

Today we feature a beer which is a bit different, it is a Saison Ale, which is a term we have never heard of before at Hoppsy, but by the taste of this magnificent beer there are bound to be more stoires of Saisons in coming months if this is any indication- it is sensational. The beer in question is Saison Dupont which is produced by Brasserie Dupont which is located in Tourpes in Belgium. The brewery only dates back to the 1950′s and is found on a farm which dates back to 1759. The Dupont Beer is a 6/5% alcohol volume beer and like many great Belgium beers is fairly cloudy and light yellow in colour- not unlike Hoegaaden and has a fruity and spicy aroma and taste- and being bottle fermented is well carbonated, and there’s a cork like champagne to pop when opening the bottle. The beer is available outside Belgium and is a popular Belgium beer in the USA, and we found it here in Australia at one of our specialty beer stores. Look out for it when you are wanting something a bit special.

Smithwicks pronounced without the ‘W’ is Ireland’s oldest ale dating back to 1710 when it was first brewed at the St Francis Abbey Brewery in Kilkenny Ireland which is Ireland’s oldest brewery and the site of a 14th century abbey. It’s a red style Irish Ale and is now brewed in both Kilkenny and in a higher strength (4.5% instead of 3.8% form) for the exported market in the Irish city of Dundalk in Louth County close to the border of Northern Ireland. The beer has been a popular Irish beer in many markets around the world expecially Canada, but it has only recently been distributed in the USA where Diageo launched it in 2004. It is making major inroads and is fast becoming one of the favorite Irish beers in America especially in New York.

The taste for British beers continues- but I promise tomorrow we will try move away from England and try something else. Today’s treat is Abbot Ale also made by the Greene King group who also made yesterday’s beer the Speckled Hen, Abbot is The Green King group’s flagship brand. This one is one of England’s more popular drops and can be found just about anywhere around the world. The Abbot Ale is fairly strong tasting ale, in England and some other places you can get it from the cask but the bottle but outside Brittan you usually only see it in bottle form. Keep your eyes out for the Abbot Reserve, it has a 6.5 alcohol volume instead of the 5.0 found in the standard and both use the Challenger and Fuggles hops which give them a very bitter sting with some distinct floral and fruity tones- the Reserve like the standard its quiet tasty. The Abbot Ale dates back to 1799, but the heritage goes back even further with the brewery drawing water from a well which has been supplying which the Great Abbey of St Edmundsbury brewed beer from nearly 950 years.

For more information: http://www.abbotale.co.uk

Well yesterday’s Boddingtons’s Pub Ale got us in the mood for tasty English Beers and the Old Speckled Hen looked pretty good down at the bottleshop today and it tasted absolutely delicious- should have bought a couple more…not to worry there is always tomorrow. The Old Speckled Hen is English bitter style beer, and is fairly new, it was first brewed in 1979 by the Moreland Brewery in Abingdon which is in Oxfordshire to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the MG car company of all reasons, which was also in Adingdon. Story has it that the brewery had a MG which was splattered with paint and the beer was named after it. The beer is available in pasteurized bottles or as a cask ale. The Morand brand has a few other interesting named products including He’s Tooth, Tanners Jack and Morland Original the brewery is operated by the Greene King Brand which also produces Ruddles, Abbot, Ridley’s and Hardy’s & Hanson products.

For more information: http://www.oldspeckledhen.co.uk/

Back in 1778 two grain merchants Thomas Caister and Thomas Fry founded the Strangeways Brewery in Manchester, England, then in 1853 a traveler called Henry Boddington joined the brewery and later bought the two partners out to be the sole owner of the brewery. Their most popular product was Boddington’s Pub Ale which is now sold in over 30 countries around the world. The brewery stayed in the Boddington family until 1989 when it was sold to Whitebread which was later taken over by the huge Interbrew company who closed the brewery in 2004 and moved Boddington’s brewing operations to Magor in South Wales and their cask cale brewing to Moss Side in Manchester. Boddington’s is known as the ‘Cream of Manchester” and sadly the only remaining reminder of the Strangeway’s Brewery will be the chimmney stack which will be kept as a memorial amongst the new redevelopment being built on the site. But Manchester hasn’t lost the beer, it might not come from the city but the taste and the spirit continues- it just gets imported into town.- arr progress.