We throw the term artisan and craft beer around a lot these days. The boundaries of the term are often stretched by breweries desperate to convey the message that they still personally roll their sleeves up and get involved in the creation of beer rather than leaving it all up to computers, buttons and valves.

Where we should draw the line between craft and non-craft beer is an ongoing and hotly debated subject. What isn’t is the fact that beer brewed in an old dairy on a farm in a field near the east coast of Denmark is craft beer with a capital C.

Stensbogaard Bryghus is a family-run brewery that produces small batches of just 1,000 litres of beer at a time. I haven’t been to their farm but I’m pretty certain there aren’t that many computerised processes involved in the making of any of their seven main beers.

Two of these, English Dark Stout and an IPA are currently available (in limited numbers) at the Systembolaget, so while I was waiting for my bottle of beer to explode last night I got stuck into the stout.

It poured as expected a deep, dark brown with an attractive off-white, beaten egg head so packed with hop aroma it smelted like a bag of old pennies. This vanished after the head died away.

Considering the beefy 6.8% ABV the mouthfeel was disappointingly thin, with some mild coffee, dark toffee, cigar box and an unsettling salty sourness in the finish that stayed in my mouth several minutes after finishing my glass.

It all reminded me of old Army and Navy English liquorice sweets my Nan used to give me as a kid and that I used to spit out the moment her back was turned. In a way this beer had a real ‘yesteryear’ taste about it, a little raw, like something I could imagine people drank in the 18th century, From a barn on a farm perhaps?

Stensbogaard Bryghus English Dark Stout

A Stout from Stensbogaard Bryghus in Denmark

6.8% ABV

Systembolaget Article Number: 11709