Regular Beers
Below are some of our main beers with write-ups by beer writer, Steve Hobman. We have a constantly changing line-up of ales from small brewerys around the country so please pop by or ring the pub to find out what we have on today.
They’re very cunning lot down at The Fox in Chetwynd Aston. Not only do they sell some pretty good Shropshire beer but now they are brewing their own. Well, bar/cellar person Todd is anyway, with a little help from the Stonehouse Brewery, which, rather curiously for this ale, happens to be on the site of a former chicken shed.
The alliance came about after amiable antipodean brewer Shane Parr (see Stonehouse Bitter) had a beer or two with the sartorially elegant 20-year-old Todd, a converted lager drinker and now our most youthful supporter of cask ale.
The boys came up with a recipe for a house beer that blends pale and crystal malts with East European Styrian hops for citrus flavours with the more delicate US Mount Hood hop. The first attempt brewed a wee bit on the heavy side, some 4.9%, so they sensibly tempered it a bit to produce light coloured and very easy drinking ale.
It’s that easy, those thirsty Foxites were like something let loose in the old Stonehouse shed when they shifted some four 72 gallons in just eight days of its first release. Quite some result for a reformed lager boy.
The brewery opened in 1980 next to the Plough Inn at Wistanstow in Shropshire, which is still the brewery’s only tied pub. Steady growth over the years included the acquisition of the Sam Powell brewery and its beers in 1991. Shropshire Lad is a strong well-balanced beer with malt and hop characters, whose complex flavours comes from a blend of selected English barley and traditional English Fuggles and Golding hops. It started life as a seasonal Spring ale in 1995 inspired by the collections of poems by A.E.Housman, but rapidly became Wood’s best seller. Well, we read the poems, and we drank the beer, and we did both simultaneously, but we couldn't put the two together - until Richard W. Jones from Welshpool very kindly sent us this link. Anyway, it has a permanent listing at the Armoury in Shrewsbury and the Fox at Chetwynd Aston, and is delicious.
Daniel Thwaites have been brewing at Blackburn in Lancashire for 200 years, and have some 455 pubs of their own. This is a well-hopped refreshing session bitter combining bitterness and nutty flavours, with a lingering bitter finish. Thwaites Bitter benefited in our pubs from Interbrew's decision in November 2003 to relaunch Boddingtons (qv) with a new recipe and an increased abv, up .3% to 4.1% from 3.8%. This resulted in several of our freehouses looking for a new session bitter, despite Interbrew's insistence that Boddies remained a session beer even at 4.1% abv (our customers disagreed.) The upshot was that Thwaites Bitter now has a permanent listing at Pen y Bryn, the Pant yr Ochain, the Dysart, Glasfryn and the Fox.
