Railway Tavern Crab n Winkle Mild

Brewed by Famous Railway Tavern
Style: Mild Ale
Colchester, England

Cask/gravity at Pig’s Ear 2009, and listed as 4%. Deep brown and apparently slightly cloudy, with a fine white head that vanished fast. Sweet chocolate on the nose plus a hint of tartness, smooth, dry and a bit fruity and tingly on the tongue, slight sourness in the dry aftertaste. Chewy yet light bodied.

29th May 2008. Very light even for a mild. Semi creamy with a very light finish.

Gravity dispense, ’All Creatures Great and Small’ festival, The Merchant’s Inn, Drugby. Haloed mahogany with murky red edges. Raisiny cocoa, faint coffee and woodsmoke aroma. Lovely dusty cocoa and milky coffee notes beyond; salty and vinous with lingering smoky afters. Mellow chocolatey mild with smoke, coffee, and splashes of aged complexity. Good one.

A Mes rate: Cask at Chelmsford Beer Festival. Black body with a tan head. Lovely coffee and dark chocolate malt. Let down a little by some plasticy notes but over all a lovely mild.

Cask (gravity dispense), London Drinker Beer Festival, March 2006. This beer had been eluding me for a long time. Its only regularly available at the one pub in Essex and it always seemed to be not ready, or already gone, when its been listed at festivals I’ve been to. The wait was worth it. Making a mild your main product is not a usual move for a brewpub and demonstrates a real devotion to the product. Very dark colour - almost black, but with a hint of red when held up to the light. Quite rich, with lots of burnt, smoky malt and a fair amount of coffee. A touch of bitterness too. Being a low ABV mild, its all fairly restrained of course. If there’s any downside, the mouthfeel is just a touch ashy. A top class mild.

Cambridge Beer Festival. A headless stout-lookalike when gravity poured! Apparently, this is a hard-to-find beer. Scent of chocolate and coffee. General aromas are smoked, burnt chocolate. Smooth on the palate, almost like a good whiskey in the taste. A little thin, but the biggest problem is that the aromas are so powerful that I’m not convinced anyone could have much more than a pint of this: I can still taste in an hour later!

Cask@London Drinker. Smokey bacon characters. Like a malty bitter, with an ashy/roasty quality, sweetish, with some lactic sourness in the finish.

Cask at London Drinker Festival 2006. Roasted chocolate aroma. Ashtray (nasty smoke). Some buttery fruit in the background.