Craigmill Swallow I.P.A.

Formerly brewed at Williams Brothers (Heather Ales)
Style: Bitter
Alloa, Central, Scotland

An amber sligthly hazy beer with a good head, though it disappears quite quick. It has a very nice fruity bitter-sweet aroma, do I detect a little orange? The flavor is a nice bitterness right from the start, no sweetness at all. It is a nice bitterness more like an English IPA than an American - different hop. The bitterness lingers a long time and turns almost woody at last. A very nice beer, that I definately will try again.

Sampled cask conditioned at GBBF.
Golden colour. Grassy, sharp hop aroma. Sweet and indistinct mellow body. Quite unpleasant.

Light amber; dried flowers in the aroma; bland, watery, touch of grass. OK, I use that description on swill lagers and this is better than that, but it is not that much better. If I didn’t know any better I’d say they were competing with Keith’s.

Cask Stillage at the Metropolitan Cathedral Crypt, Liverpool 19/02/2003 Clear golden coloured and pale. Slightly dry lasting finish.

Bottle. Safely the worst IPA i’ve ever had. Burnt honey, boiled vegetables, very flabby, limp and almost cloying mouthfeel. Sooooooooo bad.

Cask Conditioned at a Wetherspoons. Pale orange, hazy beer with no head. Thin watery beer with a crystal crispness of malty type. Not much evidence of Scottish hops.

Pale amber coloured. Sweet and weak aroma of hay. Very boring and watery. Not much hoppiness anywhere.

In late 2003, Heather Ales (which used the Craigmill badge for "non-historical" beers) took over Forth Brewery and renamed it Williams Brothers. Heather’s operations were moved to Forth, whilst the Maclay beers that had been brewed at Forth moved to Belhaven. Craigmill and Forth’s own beers seem to have been jettisoned in the process. This one is no great loss. The 355ml bottle suggests it was intended for the export marked. Exporting a session bitter to the US and calling it an IPA is not a smart move, as US drinkers expect something entirley different from an IPA. But it’s a bad beer anyway. Hazy ginger colour. Very little carbonation. Faintly hoppy aroma, with a bit of bready malt, but tainted by soggy cardboard, characteristic of pasteurised bottles. The flavour has some dry malt, again marred by cardboard. The mouthfeel is watery and the overall effect is unimpressive. No zing at all. 355ml bottle (not bottle conditioned) from beersofeurope.co.uk. BBE 31 July 2004.