It’s Andy of Andy & Jess here with my first ever blog post. 

You may remember me from such podcasts as ‘The man with the beery finger’ and ‘The beerman only rings twice’

I normally pull the levers behind the scenes to get the podcast up in iTunes, but recently me and Shovels went snowboarding in Chamonix and accidentally sampled a rather fine local beer called Pelforth and i thought it was high time i reviewed a beer in print.

As you may know from the podcast, i’m not actually much of a beer drinker, but the BeerCast has opened my mouth to some genuinely tasty and refreshing beers. I think i had assumed all beers tasted like Tennents poured in a coal mining town working mans club, but Pelforth really is a gem.

Shovels was the first to try it with a pizza on our first night but i snuck a cheeky sample when he wasn’t looking. Pelforth is one of those beers that looks dark and has a fairly high alcohol content, but actually tastes much lighter on the tongue and hides it’s alcohol very well.

It reminded me in a way of Meantime brewery’s Winter Time, a dark looking beer that’s actually very subtle.

We started with the Brun version i have described, but as you can see from the photo there is also a blonde version.

I don’t think i sampled that one, i think i’ll leave it to Shovels to expound on that flavour.

I was wondering why the label bears a picture of a Pelican but a quick squiz on Pelforth’s Wiki entry tells me that the brewery was originally called the pelican brewery but was renamed Pelforth after the second world war. It also mentions that the brewery is owned by Heineken now. 

The Oxford bottled beer database is fairly disparaging of Pelforth calling it ‘Too sweet and sterile to be classed as a great beer’ yet the comments left by fans of the beer seem to show that those who like it, really love it. It would also seem that it’s impossible to come by in Britain though.

(Any importers reading this, get on it!)