Thornbridge Brewery’s Raven

Food & drink
Thornbridge Brewery’s Raven Black IPA

I’ve recently hit a little Friday evening routine, detouring on the way home from work to plunder the shelves of the brilliant Saltaire Wines (@SaltaireWines) for a bottle or two of Proper Beer. Most weeks, I seem to come away with something or other from Thornbridge Brewery.

Thornbridge’s beer is punchy and interesting, and has a bit of attitude about it. Their most widely known brew, Jaipur, is a regular standby, and it’s a proper explosion of a bottle.

There are others, and Raven, strangely labelled as a ‘black IPA’ is a brilliant example of why more and more people are reconnecting with what I glibly titled ‘proper beer’ a few lines ago … it’s a ferociously bitter, dark beer with overtones of grapefruit and undertones of roasted malt. It’s a confusing little beer – not quite a porter, but deserving of the ‘black’ part of the title in its richness and depth, but there’s also a floridness to it that befits an IPA.

This is what real beer is about, and this is why people are rediscovering it.

Confusing … yes, but not wrong for that.

Just drink it with the thought that good things should be challenging in mind.

www.thornbridgebrewery.co.uk