Bottle at home, bought at the Lidl. Nice amber color, cream white head. Nice taste, a bit like a Belgian ale like Palm.

bottle @ british store (budapest) amber brown colour, normal body, average carbonated, light brown head, hints of oak, vanilia, caramel, malty, sweety, easy to drink

Bottle. Backlog rating from bottle collection and historic scoring. Source not recorded. No tasting notes kept, just rating.

Keg at Bishops Arms Östersund. A very nice cosy beer. Big flavours of toffee and quite creamy.

0.33l bottle. Malty aroma, light caramel notes, light spicy notes. Clear dark golden color, white head. Malty taste, caramel notes, light spicy notes, extra light sour, light sweet, light bitter. Full body, slick texture, soft carbonation and malty finish with spicy notes. Ok.

Bottle at home, amber beer, small head. Aroma is malt, vanilla, wood, honey. Taste is the same, bittersweet, not bad

Strong ale in the traditional English sense of the word, from this well-known Scottish brand, now owned by Tennent’s; Innis & Gunn’s most widespread beer, found this at a Lidl supermarket in Hulst in the southern Netherlands. Medium thick, egg-white head, quickly reduced to a moussy rim and some flat ’islands’ in the middle, over a cristal clear ’old gold’ coloured beer with orange hue. Aroma clearly pasteurized, ’cooked to death’ as it were with that ’cooked T-shirt’-kind of smell, yet with more flattering impressions underneath: caramel, vanilla (certainly the oak factor), honey, yellow raisins, melting powder sugar, candied banana, apricot, polenta, sugared camomile tea, maple syrup, vague hint of iron. Restrained fruitiness in the onset, some background hints of banana, pineapple and peach but otherwise fairly neutral, almost lager-like, sweet with the sweetness further enhanced by residual white candi ’sugariness’, lending the middle phase a honeyish character above a very cereally, simple, rounded maltiness with - again - sweet caramelly edges; carbonation remains spritzy all the time, though invisible in the glass. Slick, bit oily mouthfeel, but a little bit impaired by the carbonation, which remains above average for an English strong ale. Ends with a subtle touch of vanilla-ish oak - so subtle that the tannins from the wood remain a very faraway echo, attempting to add some dryness to the overall sweet profile of this beer, but not quite achieving that. Finish maintains the honeyish sweetness, the ’cooked’ pasteurization flavour and the overall simplicity I’d associate with a (pimped) lager more than with a strong ale; adding insult to injury, there is a ’jenever’-ish alcohol presence at the back, totally inappropriate for a beer below 7% ABV. I was hoping to position this beer as an introduction to the classical English ’strong ale’ style, but forget about that, take Fuller’s 1845, Marston’s Owd Rodger or Adnam’s Broadside instead - this is an insult to this tradition, quite heavily industrialized, bland, ’dead’ and overly sweet. It seems a lager in disguise, as there is very little left of the natural estery fruitiness of ale fermentation. Fortunately the wood factor adds a little bit of depth, but not nearly sufficiently so for my preferences (it remains as subtle as in e.g. Palm’s Cornet in Belgium, to name just one); a volatile and generic leafy hop bitter touch lingers but remains engulfed in sweetness. This kind of beer is the reason I ventured into craft beer, both traditional and innovative: I have a strong suspicion this is a strong lager rather than a real strong ale. Another cheaply made, desperately pasteurized, bland, industrial product trying to present itself as a decent, traditional British ale - with a devastating AB InBev stamp on it, standardized pottage so to speak, and this company is indeed the ultimate owner of Tennent’s which in itself owns Innis & Gunn. They can have it - and for all I care, let them throw me off this site which they - very disturbingly - partially own now. Expected a lot more, to be honest, but at least it isn’t half as bad as most Leffes, which I am convinced are mostly strong lagers disguised as abbey ales.