St. Peters Cream Stout

St. Peters

www.stpetersbrewery.co.uk/

Brewed by St. Peter’s Brewery
Style: Milk Stout
Bungay, England

St. Peter’s Brewery founded, in 1996, by entrepreneur and branding expert John Murphy, who saw a gap in the market for a modern-day craft artisanal brewery set in the beautiful English countryside.

The area he choose for his enterprise was to be in the village of St. Peter South Elmham, near Bungay, in former traditional agricultural buildings alongside the moated St. Peter’s Hall, deep in the picturesque Suffolk countryside, East Anglia, on the east coast of England. The location is ideal for its excellent water quality used in the brewing process – all beers brewed at St. Peter’s Brewery use water filtered through chalk deep beneath the brewery, obtained from their own deep bore-hole.

Alongside the brewery, St. Peter’s Hall is a historic venue with a bar and restaurant, and is available for functions, weddings, events, meetings and conferences.
The brewery also owns a London pub called The Jerusalem Tavern – a compact beer-lovers hostelry with a historic style, housed in a building dating from the eighteenth century.

Other than their range of ‘traditional’ ales, such as Best Bitter and Gatekeeper Golden Ale, St Peters also produce some more unusual beers, such as Honey Porter, Plum Porter and Citrus Beer that replicate traditional pre-nineteenth century practice of adding honey and fruit to create special seasonal brews. Also most recent developments are contemporary session ales such as Stateside Pale Ale, Revival Pilsner and White Raven. And of course for the non alcoholic drinker they created a range of true 0.0% alcohol free beers. St Peter’s Brewery beers are thriving both at home and further afield, exporting to more than 20 countries around the world.

The famous logo of the black bird and the key can be explained with history. The bird is infact a raven and is a symbol of the Vikings, marauders of the North Sea. St Peters Hall has a moat which was most likely used to defend itself from these attackers from the east. The bird is inside a barrel, which of course depicts the brewing tradition and the key represents the keys of Saint Peter – the keys of heaven, clever eh?

Review: 500ml bottle of St. Peters Cream Stout: 6.5% vol.

Coming in a really lovely oval bottle, looks vintage and has an authentic old feel to it, looks like its a hard liquor bottle. Logo of a black crow and a key, what does it all mean? Very interesting. (explained above!)

On the pour I am getting a pitch black colour, as you would expect from a stout, and a nice enough creamy tan head appearing. The head looks like caramel. Solid look overall.

A lot of lacing is present, intermittent and not in rings.

Getting a real porter smell on the nose, but its very faintish and not much to smell at all. Smoky and peaty, roasted malts, milk chocolate all noted but light, very light. On their site they called it an aromatic beer, but hell I didn’t detect a whole lot. Disappointing start.

Onto the taste then and sure enough like all English ales types and strong bitters it is bloody strong, very strong. Getting a typical porter taste, very strong dark coffee flavours, roasted malts, a touch of vanilla and a creamy chocolate taste on the tongue. Yeah very strong with the coffee, especially in the after taste.

Found it awful to drink, not nice, very deep tasting and overly bitter, the hops to the extreme. Not enjoyable at all, urgh.

Very coffee centric, not well balanced at all. Coffee, coffee, coffee, basically. Yuck, again!

A tough one to drink, wasn’t smooth or very drinkable but heh I will get hate for this, but I don’t have the English stomach for their bitters and “stouts”. I am Irish with a softer palate, so they can suck it up all they like, ha ha.

Someone online mentioned this as “a precursor of a Black IPA”, I would have to say that’s actually a good call. It feels and tastes like that to me.

Horrible. End of…