Hook Norton Best Mild

Formerly brewed at Hook Norton
Style: Mild Ale
Hook Norton, Oxfordshire, England

I used to drink this frequently and to be truthful I never noticed any discernible difference when it had a name change to hooky dark. This best mild was decent enough but overall I felt it to be thin and lacking in flavour, guess what the new one was pretty much the same, mmhh.. Hooky missed a trick there I think.

Cask Handpump at the Mill Hotel, Chester 10/03/2002 Mid to dark brown. Some fruitiness. Finishes smoothly on the palate.

Little aroma, little taste,a slight dark maltiness leads to a dry bitter sweet finish. I know it’s only 3% but why bother. Try brewing a mild at 5-6% and get the taste buds going. This is very mediocre and tasteless.

Similar to the bitter; a thin, subtle, gentlly flavoured brew which can have nice aniseed/liquorice and chocolate notes when served properly. Too often past it's best. Could do with a bit more oomph. (cask in Cap & Gown, Worcester)

Cask Conditioned, Hook Norton Brewery, Hook Norton, Oxon. A delicious dark mild, packed with flavour. I could drink this like lemonade.

Oxford Beer Fest. Gravity. Light bodied. Clean limbed and lithe. Nice licorice flavours. A decent mild, but nothing outstanding.

Cask Conditioned at The Olde Reinedeer, Banbury. This is a dark chestnut mild with whispy head. For a low abv mild it certainly packs a bit of flavour, there is a richness of plummy fruit and a decent hop content, some grassy notes perhaps. Not widely distributed so can be tricky to find, but worth it.

Sampled cask conditioned at Akkurat, Stockholm, Sweden.
Chestnut brown. Nutty aroma. Light bodied with soft mouthfeel and notes of hay. Bitterish grassy finish. Holds up extremely well for a beer with only 3.0%.