Cheshire Chocolate Porter

Some of you might recognise this beer from M&S, it's part of the range they have brewed for them by proper breweries and then stick an M&S logo on the labels. I have no problem with this as they use some excellent breweries and I it gets exposure for the breweries who don't have huge marketing budgets, Tesco do the same and I will be blogging about one of those in future. This particular brew is produced by Frederic Robinson Ltd at the Unicorn brewery in Stockport and for anyone who might be familiar with my blog it's right up my street. It is a beer I've had many times and I was once told by M&S staff had been stopped, fortunately for me it popped up again and I've taken that chance to blog so here goes. The colour as you can see is rather pale for a porter and has a gorgeous pale bronzey brown quality with the usual reddish hints around the edges. The nose is largely malty, a very smooth malt with the unsurprising chocolate notes rising through it. There was the merest edge of coffee and a nice sweetness that doesn't always come through the nose with chocolatey porters. The first thing that hit me when I drank it was how incredibly smooth this beer is, not just a little but but massively so! It slips down far to easily and then the soft chocolate flavours start and they are surprisingly long lasting. This is not the most chocolatey porter I've had but it might be the most drinkable to date. Again the sweetness came through at first but the finish is a little bitter and a touch dry. This is defiantly a beer where I would be reaching to open a second of after the first had been finished and so is highly recommended. The only thing that I would say that might possibly be construed as negative is that it isn't very complex but not every beer needs to be, you don't always want complex and when a beer does a few things this well who needs it to be.