Being from a staunchly working-class background, my only memories of Marks & Spencer as a child was of it being the place that people with white hair who wore pastel coloured slacks went to pay more money for their shopping than could be explained. As I grew up a little I began to see that they get away with it by selling the image – if you “shop at Marks”, it means something in certain circles. Just like wearing Nike means something to other people.

Nowadays I see Marks & Spencer as a shop I simply have no reason to go near. The food costs more for no reason I can see and the clothes are aimed at a demographic whose only link I ever want to have with is being from the same planet. What I didn’t expect was their beer range. Is this a new thing? By chance I ended up in the beer section – it’s not an aisle by any means – and spotted the “4 for 3″ deal that works out about a quid more than Morrisons “4 for £5.50″ deal.

The full range of Marks & Spencer's middle of the road beers. Note: drinking all of these will turn you into a Dire Straits fan.

And to the beers. This has been a troublesome write-up as I’m doing it live over the night, and I’m looking after a one year-old and a dog which has just pissed and shat diarrhea on the floor in front of me. So I must look back on the Cornish IPA in hindsight, as part of a golden age of this night which didn’t involve screaming children and canines with loose bowels. At 5% you’d expect some kind of taste but this ranks among the most flavourless beers I’ve ever come across. No smell, no real taste, nothing standing out at all. It’s bland personified, utterly inoffensive yet totally unmemorable like a drunken conversation at a party with your girlfriend’s friends of friends who you can’t even remember her connection with.

Next, Suffolk Bitter. What is this concoction? Another tasteless one, is what. It’s perfectly drinkable in the way that you buy a carton of Ribena and drink it without expecting it to taste like anything other than Ribena. But it being within expected parameters doesn’t make it good; it just tastes exactly like the last Ribena you bought, just like this beer tastes exactly like the last one.

And on to the Sussex Golden Ale. A near carbon copy of the previous two, tasting just like the most generic bitter you could ever hope to imagine. If you had to give an alien a beer to summarise the entire spectrum of beers, this would be the one to use – slightly malty, slightly hoppy, slightly impatient to finish the damn thing so you can move on to something different. My last great hope for a good finish was Staffordshire IPA, and generally being a big fan of anything IPA I was optimstic. Oh no, cruel night, you wouldn’t even let me off at the end. This is a sharp, strange beer with a feel that’s difficult to swallow and was flat in the glass half way down. A sure sign for me is that if I go more than a minute without instinctively thinking of picking the glass up, there’s something amiss. In this case a lot was amiss as I totally lost interest in drinking the rest and it dragged on for over an hour. Roger Protz said “the beer is straw coloured with sulphur on the nose, a digestive biscuit maltiness and tangy hop resins”… and “very refreshing”. I must have been drinking a different beer because mine made my mouth taste like mud.

In summary, I thought these four Marks & Spencer beers are shit. They neatly fit into the image of the rest of the place – middle of the road and awfully polite. We couldn’t have a beer that didn’t look like beer, now, could we Marjorie! What they appear to have collected is a group of beers which virtually all of their customers will find acceptable, and will think that the regionalised names on the label mean they are “trying real ale”. I find this idea as dangerous to the real ale ethos of drinking mad beers because you never know what the next one will be like, as the attempts to make ale brands big and national eg. Spitfire and Old Speckled Hen. They are taking the essence of real ale and sanitising it for the masses, which I find very wrong.

If you ever find yourself in the beer section in a Marks & Spencer, just keep on walking. You’re not missing any beers you won’t have tasted a million times already.

Beers · Cornish IPA · Marks & Spencer · Morrisons · Old Speckled Hen · Spitfire · Staffordshire IPA · Suffolk Bitter · Sussex Golden Ale

My attempt at sophisticated drinking got as far as finding the first glass cup I could lay my hands on.

Tonight’s beer is a familiar one to most, Morland’s Old Speckled Hen.

This is one of those beers that you can’t avoid and nearly everyone has heard of, but I’ve never figured out why. Even my local Spar has it, and their real ale choice is this and Newcastle Brown. Indeed, that’s why I’ve ended up buying a bottle of it to take home, when my normal approach is to try anything with a mental shiny label and a name like Yoko Ono’s been dicking about with a Swedish dictionary.

I get a little sick of seeing it everywhere because the taste is so generic; there are a thousand other beers just like it and no reason not to try them rather than sticking with the same bloody thing over and over. In this way it’s guilty of being one of those ales that become so popular that they become ubiquitous, lose their charm and are eventually dethroned from their shiny position at the forefront of the bar. Spitfire suffered that fate some time ago if you ask me, and Greene King’s IPA is so common there’s no real appeal to getting another pint of it.

The beer reminds me of the first pint of Tetleys I ever had, which I thought I’d like based on the smell of beer wafting out from pubs, but actually felt queasy after drinking because it was so beery. I think that’s what sums it up for me – it’s one of the worst possible beers you could give to someone new to bitter. Everything about it is ultra-beer and if you don’t have the stomach for it, it won’t go down well.

These guys at BeerAdvocate (which is a misleading name since all they advocate is reducing everything down to a list of its chemical elements while slagging off the people who made it) come up with some staggeringly complex descriptions of it, while still failing to describe to anyone what it’s actually like to drink. So you should know:

• ONLY drink it if you can deal with shuddering slightly after each sip rapes the side of your tongue,
• DO NOT buy a pint of this if you have 20 minutes to kill before a train and think you’ll “slip a cheeky one in”, as you’ll curse the pain of trying to force it all down in the last five minutes,
• DO buy a pint if you don’t really like real ale but want to buy a pint of it in front of some blokes from work at Friday dinner so they think you’re a proper man who knows shit about beer.

So, a thumbs down from me. It’s not a bad beer, it’s just a pretty intense version of its type.

Beers · Greene King · Morland · Old Speckled Hen · Spitfire