Strong Suffolk

Colour: Ebony

Aroma:  An appetising spicy fruit cake aroma.

Taste:  Full bodied. Combines oak, caramel and burnt toffee flavours.

Malt:  Pale, Crystal

Hops:  Challenger, First Gold and Target

Perfect with: Christmas cake, Christmas pudding, mince pie… you get the picture!

Additional Notes:  Dark and intense. An appetising spicy fruit cake aroma. Full bodied. Combines oak, caramel and burnt toffee flavours. We blend a proportion of our very special and rare vintage 5x brew with a rich malty dark ale to create a deeply satisfying and complex beer.

Contains Malted Barley

Here in Bury St. Edmunds, we’re the only brewery in the UK to continue producing 18^th century-style ‘country beer’ – in fact, our Strong Suffolk is one of the things that makes us so unique! It’s a blend of two beers – Best Pale Ale (BPA) and Old 5X.

We cherish Old 5X here at Greene King. It’s very strong – at 12% – and is stored in three wooden oak vats at our brewery in Bury St. Edmunds for at least two years. The area inside the brewery where the vats are stored were once tunnels that linked the monastery with the local abbot’s house: convenient for lie-lowing monks at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries.

The lids of the vats are covered in marl – a word in Suffolk dialect for the sandy gravel that covers much of the county. The weight of the marl stops the effect of the secondary fermentation from opening the lids.

While Old 5X on its own can taste very tart and sour, Strong Suffolk hits the spot. The vintage ‘country beer’ has a spicy, oaky, sherry wine and iron-like intensity on the aroma and palate with a profoundly sour note.