Ale in the Lake District #1 - Hawkshead Brewery

 

Is The Lake District the best bit of Great Britain? Sure, it is oft over-filled ( mostly with teachers during any mid term holiday) and the lovely-looking pubs are awash with dreary, disappointing Jennings / Marstons beers but times are a-changing. Cumbria has periodically boasted about having the most breweries per capita or something similar and now some of them are pushing for Premier League status.Coniston Brewery have always been solid ( it's in their water!?) but the likes of Hardknott and Hawkshead have also been worthy of recent note.

BEWARE! There are several Staveleys but thankfully we found the right one for the tap house and brewery for Hawkshead and were definitely not disappointed.

 

 

24 potential handpulls, a smattering of keg and fantastic food made the trip off of the A591 well worthwhile.

 

Decisions, decisions

Top tapas

 

Gotta love a comfy couch

In the name of research, I sampled most stuff. 5 Hop was probably the pick. Their Pale was pretty close to perfect mind and at only 3.5% and the Great White (4.8%), whilst with it's wheat, botanicals and manageable motueka sounded like my nightmare, was actually deceptively drinkable. Hop Black was a solid BIPA but not really enjoying that style at the mo. However, my OH reyt enjoyed her ITI, a snazzy NZPA named after the maori word for `little` apparently.

There is also an excellent beer shop at Hawkshead Brewery stocking lots of their wares plus some classic Euro fare. I grabbed some bottles of bourbon barrel-aged Brodies Prime #4 for the road and this proved to be a great choice. A 12 month oak barrel maturation sees this core range beer go from a tidy 4.9% up to BPX at 8.5%. During Beer Central's bottle share event at the Sheaf View a few days later, this brew scored really well; Muriel Spark would have been quite proud. `Wiki` her!