Brewery: Coach House Brewing Company
Location: Warrington, England
ABV: 5.0%
Version: Bottled
Source: Tesco

Based on a positive experience or two with fruit beers recently (namely Fruli Strawberry) I thought I’d give this one a go. Best bitter? Blueberries? What’s not to like, right? Unfortunately, as it turned out, quite a lot…

It all started out well enough, with a whiff of crushed blueberries on the nose and a rather pleasant golden amber colour to the beer. The first sip was quite promising as well; a definite fruity tang, quite pleasant… until the after-taste kicked in: a very definite chemical-taste; quite sharp and citrus-acidic, bitter, but not at all in a good way.

I’m fairly sure (unless, of course, this one had gone off in the bottle) that the problem lies with the label’s ingredients list: “malted barley, blueberries and natural Blueberry Flavouring”. That last item? Not a good sign … if you need to flavour a beer with fruit, surely you should just stick to using fruit, no? If the fruit doesn’t flavour the beer strongly enough, add more fruit. If you have to resort to “natural” flavourings, then you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere, I reckon. Anyhow, after another couple of mouthfuls to confirm that this one wasn’t going to get any better, it went down the sink.

According to a news item on the Coach House brewery website (Jan 12th) blueberry classic won a gold medal at the S.I.B.A North Region Beer Festival earlier this year, so I can only conclude it tastes a lot better on draught that it does out of the bottle.