"Lovely Ale" is the translation of Tomos Watkin's Cwrw Brâf, and that's not a bad name at all. The beer comes from Tomos Watkin, a Welsh craft brewer in Swansea. I saw it last Wednesday on the way back from end-of-season gleaning at our farm co-op in New Jersey (90 minutes of chopping broccoli and pulling beets in 33° breeziness had put a thirst on me!), and grabbed it: it was the daffodil on the label that caught my eye on such a cold November day.I split it with Cathy that night over dinner, a kind of pasta/sausage primavera...in November. Pasta autunno? Anyway, we had freshly-pulled carrots and fresh-cut broccoli with penne and sausage, dressed lightly with vodka sauce, and the Cwrw Brâf was up to the match.
It poured a nice light brown with a reddish-orange cast to it, not quite as nice a head of foam as the picture, but still good. The aroma was mostly of malt and caramel, although there was some light fruitiness. A mouthful gave good fresh malt 'beer' flavor, that amalgam of English ale yeast character and malt that makes this type of beer so pleasing for long-term drinking. You've got flavor for interest, and drinkability for sessioning. This was classic: quite good enough for pleasant drinking and piqueing the interest, not loud or assertive enough to dominate your attention. Comfortable, in a word; a lovely ale indeed.
