Belgian Blonde

I went to a CAMRA meeting in Stockport last week at which a marketing and pubs manager from Robinsons, the Victorian brewery whose redbrick tower still rises above the town centre, gave us a presentation about recent additions to their draught range, and, very kindly, some free bottles of Blonde Tom, their new Belgian-style strong ale, to sample.

Blonde Tom belongs to the same family of beers as Old Tom, the 8.5% dark strong ale first brewed in 1899 which is one the company's best-known products, although at 6% it's not quite as potent as its older brother and, as the name suggests, has a golden colour. It combines English hops with a Belgian yeast strain rather than the one they normally pitch into their open fermenters to give it a different taste to that of their other beers. The beer one of them mentioned as the kind of strongish golden ale they were aiming for was Duvel.

Blonde Tom is a thinnish beer with a quickly dissipating head, quite sweet, but with a refreshing sharpness too. I'm not sure I picked up any specifically Belgian notes, but it defintely doesn't have the normal Robinsons taste. It'd be interesting to try a cask version to compare it to the bottled one.