INTRODUCTION

Welcome to another installment in the series about my Scottish holiday. This post deals with one particular aspect of the whole week. 

THE ISLE OF SKYE BREWERY PRODUCTS

My first encounter with the products of this local brewery which specialises in  craft ales was on the Saturday, at Hector’s Bothy. I also sampled some of their product at lunch on the Isle of Skye on the Tuesday, and a selection box of four bottles from Kyle of Lochalsh Co-op enabled my to broaden the range of my sampling. All these ales have a strength of between 4 and 4.5%. Here now are my findings about each the ales I drank:

1. Skye Blaven (blue label on bottle): a perfectly fine craft ale, albeit the least impressive of this particular selection.
2. Skye Red – a rich, full flavoured drink. The fact that I rated this one third of the four is credit to the top two, not in any way discredit to this one.
3. Skye Gold – a heavily hopped ale which also features a highly unusual ingredient – porridge oats. This is a delicious drink, and it would require something special to keep this one out of the top spot, but fortunately for me this brewery has something else that is not merely special but absolutely unique…
4. Skye Black – a unique craft ale, because it contains oatmeal. The result of the combination of the oatmeal with malted barley, hops, yeast and water is a truly remarkable drink. Imagine the finest stout you have ever encountered and then ramp the quality up from that and you get somewhere close to just how good this drink is.