Real Ale Reviews

Old Speckled Hen

2

I had a hard day on the other love of my life today – Hockey. Yes  I am aware that it is a girls sport! Anyway, I’ve been at the Yorkshire Cup tournament all day which involved stopping and starting and ultimately just getting the result we needed to not get relegated from next year’s tournament. Limping back to the car earlier this evening I decided I needed a Chinese takeaway and my pre marathon ration of beer (T- 7 days until normal service resumes).

So, having ordered a Special Chow Mein, I nipped down to a Somerfield garage to pick up a bottle. There wasn’t a massive range, not that you would expect there to be as it is one of those mini supermarkets that seem to have attached themselves to petrol stations just recently. The choice was mainly limted to quite mainstream ales so I was quite conscious that I didn’t want to pick one that had already been reviewed…racking my brains I couldn’t recall ever writing anything about Old Speckled Hen, despite having had it on a number of occasions. I decided that this was the winner for tonight.

I had always assumed this beer was called Old Speckled Hen because of it’s dark reddish brown colour which, if I recall correctly from growing up in the country, is the same as a lot of chickens. It turns out that I was wrong. The beer is actually named after a car, which was known as the ‘Old  Speckled Un’,  used in an MG factory years ago. In 1979 MG asked Moorland Brewery to create a commemorative beer to celebrate the factory’s 50th anniversary and somewhere along the  line the name was changed to Old Speckled Hen before finding its way onto the bottle.

This story is one of those that I think would make James May puff out his chest with pride in English tradition and, to be honest, the fact that you can walk into a Tesco Extra and buy a beer named after a car, to commemorate a factory’s 50th anniversary 30 years ago, kind of gives me a warm glow as well.

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Tags: 1979, 5-6%, Commemorative, Greene King, MG, Moorland Brewery, Old Speckled Hen