This morning was meant to be lager brewing day. The brew team were up and ready and an ungodly hour – raring to go, even though it is the Sabbath. Then the early morning sunshine induced some sort of telepathic connection between the two head brewers and instead of travelling to the brewery and getting the much needed lager underway – they found themselves, inexplicably, at the golf course – and there they stayed with other island worthies only making it back to the civilisation of the hotel in time for a couple of pints and a go of some numbers game that is sweeping the island. Don’t let anyone tell you its hard work running the Isle of Colonsay Brewing Company Ltd. It’s not.
THE GOLF COURSE
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There have been allegations in the past that the Colonsay brewery team spends it' winer hanging round the brewery sinking pints. Whilst there may have been an element of this in the past we are reformed characters. Some bright spark decided to widen our cyber footprint and head off to Facebook -- -- and it seems to be taking up rather a lot of time. Being Facebook virgins we have found it very interesting to see the people being thrown up by our search for friends. Many of them mean nothing at all to us and if you have had a request to be our pal and feel offended being cyber stalked by a brewery then all we can say is sorry.
However its rather fun seeing the networks spread out and people from various spheres being found. If you would please point folk towards out page and ask them to become friends...it only takes a second and keeps us off the booze.
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The mainland man was loading up for deliveries just after Christmas and secretly said to himself - we'll never shift all that lager - they've brewed far too much, tut tut tut.
Today - two bottles left --- ease up folks ... its cold brewing here.
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And another one from Real-ale-reviews.com
Colonsay 80/- Ale – 4.2%
The initial impression I got of this beer (largely from the bottle) was that it looked a little camp. The pink label and fancy writing stood out but it didn’t take too much of a closer inspection to see that this really isn’t the case. The Brewer’s description states that they ‘think the slight peatiness of our island water brings out the malt, almost smoky flavour’. I soon realised that this beer isn’t the gaudy insecure chap making a lot of noise in his bright pink shirt but rather the big guy who’s comfortable in his salmon shirt happy in the knowledge that;
1. if he wanted to (and he never would) he could kick your arse; and,
2. his girlfriend is gorgeous.
And so it is with 80 /-. The initial taste is similar to a traditional non hopped British Bitter, John Smiths Cask for example, and only a slightly lighter tone of colour indicates the crisp, clearer and lighter flavour that follows. The smoky depth comes through into your mouth after you have swallowed but whilst on the tongue the beer offers a soft clarity which, while not dominating the taste buds, flows around the mouth with a velvet smoothness.
The sum total of these attributes results in a subtle drinkability, with the flavoursome aftertaste quickly drawing the glass back to the mouth until the full pint has quickly vanished. This is one of the most pleasingly drinkable Ales I can remember enjoying in recent times.
We think that is a good review - don't you
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We do have computers at home though and often Google the brewery to see what people are saying about us: Here's one that's rather good from thebeercast.com.
Beer fancying isn’t just about a competition to find the darkest, strongest, most pungeant brew you can. Most beer websites and blogs do tend to concentrate on that end of the spectrum, but only because they tend to be the most interesting and flavoursome. Even the most ardent lagerfan would probably admit the lack of taste the lighter-coloured stuff suffers from. But less taste doesn’t mean no taste (unless you opt for certain lagers), there shouldn’t be a stigma against drinking good lager - after all, it was invented by the Czechs, and they know more or less everything good about brewing.
So amongst the BeerCast’s regular malty, hoppy, caramelly (Podcast no.1 was brought to you in conjunction with that particular word) offerings, this committed Lagerboy will now and again pop up with a few drinks from the world of beers that you can actually see though. But just as ‘real ale’ suffers from an image problem, so does lager - one of popularity. In 2005, the UK lager market was worth £11.3bn - nine out of the top ten takehome beer brands were lagers (Guinness being the other). 42% of British adults now buy and drink it. By 2010, 80% of all UK beers sold are expected to be lager. Yikes.
But most of the major brands out there are the same old suspects - Stella, Carlsberg, Carling, Fosters. They don’t taste of much, they are fairly cheap, you can buy them in any off-licence or pub. But it doesn’t make them any good. Take Stella, the UK’s most popular lager (it has a third of the market), due to recent issues of ‘branding’, producer InBev added more boutique beers to the stable, a wheatbeer called Peeterman, and a 6% super lager called Bock, which someone bought by mistake the other week and nobody would drink it. Fosters, brewed in Edinburgh, is the typical Australian lager - except I lived there for almost a year and hardly ever saw it.
You have to search them out, but local lagers are available. They cost more than the mass-produced types (although Stella recently went up again, by 12p a pint), but are infinately nicer, with more taste - and you get a pompous air of smugness to have sought out something regional that the other lagerboys will have never heard of. Take Colonsay Lager. Produced by a small new microbrewery from the tiny Scottish island of 120 people, they knock out this 4.4%abv gem using local ingredients and a slower fermentation process. That means the lager has a touch of the wheatbeer about it, and is a dark apricot, almost amber colour. Incredibly refreshing, and with a packed taste, it blows the Carlings of this world out of the water. Which can only be a good thing.
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