Getting darker

In the course of this year’s Mild Magic, I had 25 different milds from 22 breweries; Brightside, Holt’s and Thornbridge were the breweries offering more than one, although only Thornbridge had both a dark and a light mild on offer; there were sightings of Timothy Taylor’s Dark Mild, but I only saw Golden Best. In fact those two – Taylor’s Golden Best and Thornbridge Gold – were the only light milds. The remainder were uniformly dark, with the interesting exception of the mid-brown Heritage 1950s Burton Ruby Mild – which I described as tasting like a “sweetish, light-bodied, mid-brown old-school bitter”. It’s interesting that, at the two pubs I visited this year which didn’t have a mild on, this was precisely what I ended up drinking – a dark, sweetish, old-school bitter; Theakston’s XB in one, Blackjack Drinking Beer #1 in the other. OK, ‘interesting’ may be exaggerating. But dark bitters, although rarely seen in the Manchester/Sheffield/Leeds triangle, are a longstanding interest of…