Best new beers of 2011…Summer Wine Cohort

Our final best new release of 2011 is a beer that appeared only a few weeks ago – from a small-scale brewery in Yorkshire. The Summer Wine Brewery have been going for about three years – but recently have firmly thrust themselves into the crosshairs of the bloggerati. All of their beers pack a punch (which is probably why) – their double black Belgian rye IPA is no exception…

Cohort (7.5%)
Summer Wine Brewery, Holmfirth, Yorkshire
(keg, released November 2011)

Stop me if you’ve heard something like this before – “We plan to tear up the rule book & brew beers that demand you sit up & take note by shaking up your senses.” Taken from Summer Wine’s website, it reads straight from the Fraserburgh school of beer marketing. If SW plan to go along the BrewDog route, they’ll need some seriously thumping beers to back up the talk. Luckily (or skillfully) they seem to be walking the walk – their strong IPA Diablo is a pithy grapefruit monster, Barista a caffeine thunderbolt.

Andy and James have also crossed the ultimate ‘craft’ line, by laying down a beer in barrels – Kopikat, an imperial vanilla coffee stout. Co-incidentally it was just after sampling another imperial VCS (Harknott’s rollocking Vitesse Noir) at the Free Trade Inn in Newcastle, that I got to taste Summer Wine’s Cohort for the first time. The beer scene in the North-East of England is thriving, and pubs from South Yorkshire to the Scottish border have been taking SW’s beers recently – a sure measure of their popularity.

Cohort was jet black, with a tiny, tight fizzy head. Once the beer warmed a little, the aroma was fabulous – resinous hop mixed with roasty malt. Clearly they love to pile zingy hops into everything, and the balance with the slightly spicy roast from the rye was really something. It may seem that 7.5% is the new 5% – but these kind of beers are just so full of flavour – and clearly Summer Wine are on to a major winner.

Well, that’s it – our six best new British beers of 2011. Tomorrow we’ll be posting the ‘nearly beers’ – we had to narrow the field down somehow, but there were far more than six great new beers around this year. If your latest favourite hasn’t been listed yet, it may well be tomorrow…