Wellington Brewery Special Pale Ale (4.5%)
Back in the late 1980s, I spent many of my evenings working in a corporate bar utterly dominated by the big breweries, with one solitary tap rather reluctantly given over to an Ontario ‘microbrew.’ That beer was SPA, as Wellington’s Special Pale Ale is otherwise known, and it was all I drank after (and occasionally during) my shift.
Of course, that was in the very early days of Ontario craft beer, scant years after Wellington opened in 1985 as one of the initial trio of microbreweries in the province. (The other two were Upper Canada, the brands of which are now owned by Sleeman, and Brick, now known as Waterloo Brewing and owned by Carlsberg.) My friends and I might not have been sure exactly what SPA was, but we knew that we liked it!
Thirty-five years later, SPA is still around and, while memories are notoriously fallible where taste is concerned, to me it’s not quite the same – although it might actually be better.
The colour is coppery gold and the nose offers an attractive mix of peach and apricot with biscuity malt and hints of orange marmalade – not exactly as I remember, but if anything more aromatic. The flavour holds a mellow hoppiness with biscuit and marmalade flavours up front, and a rounder, slightly toffee-ish and faintly tannic mid-palate following, accented by a gentle floral note that fades as the beer ages. (The sample I obtained for this review was less than two weeks in the can.) The finish befits well a proper English-style pub ale, with rapidly fading caramel sweetness replaced by a gently bitter and leafy aftertaste.
On a recent non-note-taking day, SPA reminded me a bit of the golden bitters that have become popular in London pubs over the past couple of decades, although it is neither golden nor quite properly a bitter. Instead, it is crisp without being thin or anemic, refreshing without sacrificing malt heft, and hoppy without coming across as some sort of beery tropical fruit punch. Definitely a most worthy flag-bearer of a brewery that has for almost forty years championed English style ales, best enjoyed as fresh as possible and not too cold.
86 ($3.55)