Beer Review
Summer Wine Brewery - Cohort 7.5%

Cohort. It's a word that has several meanings.
For example, it is a taxonomic rank of zoological species in Biology, a sub-class if you will.
In education it is a group of students working through the same academic curriculum.
It is the basic tactical unit of a Roman Legion and consisted of six 'centuria' of 80 men, each commanded by a centurion, not 100 men as we would think.
In beer a Cohort is a Double Black Belgian Rye PA by Summer Wine Brewery from Holmfirth in West Yorkshire, and it is this particular meaning that interests me today.
Ingredients include Pale, Rye and Carafa malts, Summit, Citra, Chinook, Simcoe and Amarillo hops, and some Belgian yeast.
It's time to see how it all works together.
It pours a thick deep dark brown with the merest hint of port red right at the edge, with a beige head that settles to a small disc on top of the beer. An aroma of blackberries and pine dominate with some vanilla and mango buzzing in the background. A oily and slick over the tongue, there is also a touch of the roughness associated with a rye beer in there too. More blackberry with blackcurrants, coffee and passion fruit immediately smack you in the mouth. These flavours are big and bold, making absolutely no apologies for their bluntness. Grapefruit with a hint of lemon sweeps in before a touch of liquorice and pine pounce on them from the roof of the mouth. Dry tropical fruit flavours with a small but yummy amount of milk chocolate round out the finish, leaving a whisper of passion fruit, mango and pine lingering a long time. This is an astonishingly good beer.
I have only had a few Summer Wine beer before. Looking back through my beer notes, my first, the Lime and Coriander Saison was 'sweet with a little lime and some floral hop'. I have written 'Ok - just' next to it. For Santo, my next experience I have noted ' very dry with a light lime and sharp grapefruit citrus, much better than I was expecting'. However, it was Barista on cask (that I will be reviewing from the bottle soon) that was the turn-around beer for me, and reading what others had tweeted and reviewed I took the plunge and bought all I could online.
I'll be tasting and reviewing many more of there beers over the next week or so, and I'd be more than happy if yo could join me.