We are delighted to announced that Team Moon Gazer has scooped another three awards for the quality of our cask ales, as we picked up a Gold, Silver and Bronze award at this year’s Norwich Beer Festival.
What’s great about these particular awards, as well as being very local to us, is that they are voted for by cask ale lovers faced with an array of some 600+ beers. So, the competition to get noticed is pretty fierce to say the least!
Well, get noticed we did, collecting three awards.
The awards were gold for our Full Caff, silver for our Bouchart mild and a debut bronze for our new Witch Hare.
The Full Caff award was great. This featured in the Specialty Ales section and was a unique beer created for the Curiosity Bar at the festival, where the organisers invite brewers to come up with the unexpected.
We figured that no one would expect a light, golden pale ale to taste like coffees – so that’s what we set about to produce.
Taking our ever-popular Pintail ale as a base we produced some cold-pressed coffee and, along with some lactose and used them in a secondary fermentation process. This level of addition is enough to give a full on coffee and cream flavour but not quite enough to start colouring the ale – so it still present as a light golden ale. This creates a bit of an illusion since people would expect a coffee beer to be dark in appearance.
Well, as well as confusing the sight senses we are delighted that it tickled the taste senses and got voted a winner!
Silver medal went to our Bouchart Mild in the dark beer category. A regular award winner Bouchart is a 4.9% mild with plenty of malt complexity in the flavour.
Finally, we picked up a bronze in the ruby and red bitter category. Witch Hare was a debut award winner as it made its first appearance at the Beer Festival. This is always a great feeling that you know you have made a new beer that people love.
Thank you to all the festival goers for supporting real ale and for voting Moon Gazer a winner.
Cheers