The only dark beer in Ferry Ales Brewery's range of craft cans, Great Character 'A' keeps things simple, but does it well.
Filled with malty flavours including chocolate malt and cara malt to impart sweet, toffee like flavours along with a good dose of fruit and nut flavours to create a classic porter.
It's quite low-strength at 4.7%, but with this takes nothing away from the flavours in the beer.
By Ferry Ales Brewery
There's a chocolate aroma on the pop of the can, with a hint of malt flavour to boot. The pour is quite thin, which is to be expected at less than 5%, and the body is a little thin too, giving it quite a light mouthfeel more normal with lighter beers.
There's a slight roasted flavour of the malt initially which develops into a subtle sweet flavour that keeps a touch of roastiness to balance it out nicely. The chocolate and caramel is present in the sweet and creamy flavour, but it's not obvious and competes with the malt flavour for prominence.
The aftertaste retains a bit of sweet flavour but it's very subtle, with the main aftertaste being malty, which is not unpleasant; just a little one-dimensional.
Following in the theme of the rest of the Great Character range, Great Character 'A' is a mirror image of it's siblings 'F' and 'B'. The main label colour is black, with the giant letter 'A' featuring in white, as opposed to the other two styles which were white label/black font.
It's apt that they've chosen this for the porter, which is a great design choice and helps to break up the can designs a little.
They also keep the style of including loads of information on their cans, the rear of the can having a mini-novel on the back about the bio of the beer, the ingredients used and even charts on flavour profile.
Buy it only from Ferry Ales Brewery in cases of 12 for £35, which works out at £2.92 per can. Alternatively you can buy it in taster packs and gift packs with the other beers in the Great Character range that are available to try them out.
