Southwold Bitter 3.7% abv
Adnams Southwold Bitter
Tasting notes
Southwold Bitter is a beautiful copper-coloured beer, late and dry-hopped with Fuggles for a distinctive, lingering hoppiness.
Brewed with the finest East Anglian malted barley, sourced locally to the brewery. We use a blend of hop varieties, including Fuggles, which we add late in the boil to preserve the herbal flavours of this traditional English hop. We add more Fuggles to each cask so that the flavour of the hops infuses into the beer.
What’s the story?
Southwold Bitter is as distinctive as ‘Southwold Jack’ (the knight with the sword) who appears on the pump clip and has done so through many incarnations. Many Adnams beer fans would agree with our Head Brewer that Adnams Bitter is a truly distinctive pint. We wouldn’t be overselling it to describe it as a classic.
(1 unit/half pint)
Want to know more?
International Beer Challenge Bronze Award winner 2010
CAMRA Champion Beer of East Anglia 2007
First brewed in 1967, the packaged version was until recently years called ‘Suffolk Strong Bitter’ and depicted a scene of the brewery on the packaging.
- Bottled Adnams Southwold Bitter
Bottled Adnams Southwold Bitter
At 4.5% abv, bottled Bitter is refreshing, distinctively hoppy and dry with wonderful malt aromas. Delicious served cool.
(2.3 units per bottle)
Weighing less than 300g, our new, award-winning 500ml bottles are one of the lightest in the bottled beer category. Better still, they’re 100% recyclable.
Adnams Southwold Bitter is available in bottles to buy online.
11 Comments
Adnams Bottle Bitter And Broadside
Adnams bitter bottled and draught variants were for a long time among my favourites for very different reasons. Adnams bitter was always a pleasant well balanced pint I have not been able to obtain it recently having moved from Essex to the midlands. Suffolk strong bitter (bottled) was brilliant it had a thirst quenching sappy aggressively hoppy blood orange bitterness with no compromising sweetness. I have tried bottles of of bitter and broadside recently and found both over sweetened through addition of too much malt and the good fruit characters they had lost
CF sweetening of cough medicine which the beers now remind me of.
Kevin,
Glad you enjoyed the beer.
You might try Shelton Brothers they import a few beers from the UK including Adnams and I am not sure how up to date this site is but it may help http://www.cask-ale.co.uk/us/.
Regards
Sean
Just got back from the UK had some of this and loved it. I was lucky to bring some back home to the USA. Gave what I had left to my friends and they loved it as well. This beer is a very well balanced beer. Wish we had it here in the states. Do you all ship to the states?
Ray,
It is already available in mini-casks, either in your local store or online here.
Thanks
Sean
When will Southwold Bitter, my favourite from your splendid range, be available in Mini Casks please ?
Hi Shaun
Thanks for taking the time to e-mail us. Sorry that you didn’t have a very good pint. All our regular cask beers should be served bright.
There are many reasons why a beer might be cloudy, many of which will only affect the appearance and not the taste however the fact that it was tart suggests an infection. We’ll contact the pub to get a bit more detail.
Thanks again for letting us know
Coincidentally, I was googling ‘cloudy Adnams’ after a dispute with the staff at the Bristol Bar, Brighton on Wednesday. Your Broadside is easily my favourite beer (not counting the ’seasonal’ Young’s Winter Warmer).
The Bristol were serving Harvey’s (our local, and always a safe bet) which I know *shouldn’t* be cloudy, so when served a tart, opaque glass of that, I chose Adnams Southwold for my next drink. The same taste and appearance convinced me it wasn’t right, so I returned it to the bar – only to be told “it’s just gone on” and “no-one else has complained”. Your posting here makes me think I was right. Poor beer and poor service: they’re doing you a disservice. Luckily our local Morrison’s has Broadside in bottles – to paraphrase George Thorogood, “I drink at home”
Hi J.Wallas
Thanks for contacting us. I don’t think our beer is always cloudy. Cask beer can have a haze for a number of reasons but we check every batch of beer before we put it into cask and also again when it is in cask to make sure it will drop bright before it goes out. Obviously we can’t test every cask from a batch but the beer we do test is bright. It is quite possible that a small number of casks from a batch can have an issue however if your experience is that it is always cloudy then something else is wrong.
Do you drink it in one pub or a number of pubs in the same area? Could you let me know which pubs or ask the landlords to contact us so we can find out what the problem is? You can e-mail me at fergus@adnams.co.uk
Caroline,
I have just double checked and when you search for Bell or Bell Inn the Bell Inn at Middleton comes up top result.
Regards
Sean
why is your beer always hazy, as I have had tonight and my pub says it is always
like that.
Why can your pubfinder facillity on this website not locate my local, the Middleton Bell, which I can see through my window, right now????
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[...] the balance seemed wrong. Too bitter – almost metallic. It didn’t compare well with the Adnams Bitter in the Betjeman Arms at St Pancras station. A classic, hoppy, amber beer. Perfect. In a retro move, [...]