Picking favourites

It's been a while since I last had any beer from Marks & Spencer. The former high-end UK grocer used to be reliable for sturdy, traditional bottled beers of the bitter and pilsner sort, and it still stocks those, but I noticed more of a turn to contemporary beer fashion lately. 440ml cans, for one thing. I picked these two because they're produced for M&S by two of my favourite English breweries, so it seems like someone on the beer-commissioning side at the company has taste.

Adnams has long been a partner, and brewed many a slightly-tweaked version of their main beers for M&S. This one is original, as far as I know: Spruce Tip Pale Ale. I like a bit of the botanical now and then. As well as the spruce, there are juniper berries too, and the can promises "a hint of zesty lemon". It's a medium gold colour and very slightly hazed. The aroma does give off that zest, though more like lemon candy than the real thing. It's light-bodied and crisp, almost lager-like, with a modest ABV of 4.8%. In the flavour, the lemon is more than a hint, it's the whole deal. That makes it very refreshing, all summery sorbet and lemon-drop candy. What's missing? Oh yes: the spruce. I thought there would be a bit of greenery in the taste too, but there's not. The whole thing is very simple and fairly undemanding. I had hoped for something more novel and interesting, so it was a bit of a let-down. The Adnams quality shows through, and I could easily drink a lot of this. But there's no excuse for such a waste of spruce, not to mention the juniper berries. We move on.

While I'm not the Siren fanboy I once was, they do make exceedingly good stouts. They've brewed the canned Nitro Stout for Marks & Spencer, where it sits near the very decent bottled one that Carlow Brewing has been making for them since the beginning of time. This can is not widgeted so it's on the drinker to pour it vigorously to form the appropriate head. For possibly the first time in my experience, that works, and I got a pleasant-looking crème-caramel puck of foam over the pure black body. Vague milk chocolate is all the aroma offers from that, the nitrogen doing its usual nefarious work of muting such features. Full marks for the texture. I'm sure that making this a silky charmer was goal number one, and it absolutely is; light enough to be gulpable at 4.6% ABV, slick on the palate, but not cloying. There's no big bold flavour, which is a little disappointing but perhaps to be expected. What impressed me most is that it's not predominantly sweet: the aroma had me fearing a Dairy Milk overload. Instead, it has a dark chocolate character, with a real cocoa bitterness and a rasp of toasted grain. It meets the specs of draught Irish stout, but very much the better sort, with enough going on in the flavour to be suited to tasting instead of just drinking. While not up to the mark of Siren's best work (I had secretly hoped it was Broken Dream in disguise) it meets the requirements of just-Nitro-Stout-thankyou extremely well.

I can't be too critical of these because they're both jolly nice beers with not a thing wrong. It is evident, however, that they're for the supermarket, and have a crowd-pleasing, low-common-denominator factor about them: created to the spec of someone who wears a suit rather than overalls. To be expected from Marks & Spencer, I guess.