Sunday 22 May 2011

Isle of Skye 'Black Cuillin'

From Scotland's  Isle of Skye brewery is a bottle of 'Black Cuillin'.
They describe this beer on their website as follows 
A distinctive dark ale brewed with roast barley and rolled roast Scottish oatmeal, giving an almost stout-like bitterness, smoothed through the addition of pure Scottish heather honey. It is believed that this is the only ale, as distinct from stout, which uses rolled roast oatmeal.
That certainly makes my job easier.
When they say heather honey i presume that means honey from bees that predominately use heather to obtain their pollen.
It is a 500mls bottle, and has an abv of 4.5% , although not bottle conditioned.

Colour is quite dark indeed, held up to the light shows some deep red colour. Aroma is custard creams(!), earthy and some coffee. And, um, a hint of marmite.

It has a thin to medium body, leaves a ring of just of white head down the glass.It is reasonably creamy in texture, coffee but not a strong hit of it, chocolate but again not a dark heavy one. The chocolate doesn't stay long though, and again i get something like marmite (which is fine, i love marmite, but once i start thinking about it i cannot get it out of my head that its there). 
As it warms the bitterness and coffee are becoming more evident.

It very drinkable but just not terribly exciting. Not that theres anything wrong with that, its a nice beer, but i think i'd look to try others in their range before buying this one again, they seem to know how to brew well on this first example i would say.

Sorry about the poor photo though.

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