I picked up two bottles of this 4.2% bottle conditioned offering from S H Jones Wine Merchants when back in Banbury a couple of months  ago. I was excited when I saw it because I am actually from Cropredy, growing up on a farm outside the small North Oxfordshire village in which the famous 1644 battle took place. As a primary school student I remember going around to Cropredy Village Church to see the bloodstain on the vestry floor said to be of the Roundhead messenger who fled the battlefield. With childhood memories like that floating around like the sediment in a recently disturbed bottle it is no wonder that I really, really wanted to like this beer.

Cropredy Bridge 1644 - the good bottle

You will understand then that I was completely wounded upon opening my first bottle of Cropredy Bridge 1644 to find that I had purchased a beer that tasted of…surely not…oh…it can’t be…yes…this beer tastes of STILTON!!!!! Fortunately I had got the two bottles and was able to find out that the Stilton vibe was purely the result of an unfortunately selected ‘off’ bottle.

The the second time of asking this Cherwell Valley Brewery ale was a huge amount more pleasing (well it didn’t taste of cheese so that was a plus right off the middle of the bat). I had it well rested but it was still a touch cloudy with what I would call a very real body. In fact I would say it is a very down to earth ale in all respects. It is not very hoppy but has the less aggressive flavour similar to local cask ales such as Hooky Bitter.

For the Real real alers out there this beer doesn’t have the hopiness or fruitiness to be turning any heads. Having said that, as a guy who  grew up in the village that insspired it, I can honestly say that this beer does conjure up the flavours of a place, of a summer afternoon outside the Brasenose Pub, of a Winter’s evening in Geoff Wheeler’s kitchen. For me this beer captures Cropredy, or maybe that’s just the opinion of someone living a long way from home.

I was a little disappointed the other week when I visited Jones’ and found that the beer selection had decreased since my last visit a little over 12 months ago. ‘We just didn’t have the space’ the lady behind the counter replied ‘we extended the coffee shop area and something had to go’. Normally I would have cried into a large espresso at this point, had the management not seen Oz and James, the increase in the number of Micro-Breweries in the UK? Beer is back, why sacrifice half the range for a continental coffee shop?!?!?

Luckily the next words saved the day. ‘We just decided to focus on local beers since we had less space.’ I couldn’t argue. Looking along the four shelves of ales and ciders I didn’t see any that would had been brewed too far from Oxfordshire. The Cotswold Brewing Company, Cherwell Valley Brewery, Warwickshire Beer Company and, of course, Hook Norton Brewery all featured. And it made sense,  I can’t imagine people were going into Jones’ to buy more beers that are widely available through supermarkets (and most likely more cheaply) so it is logical for them to focus on the niche area of the market.

Jones’ is primarily a wine merchants and I am led to believe a very good one at that. It is also now somewhere where the people of Banbury can get a coffee and sandwich on their dinner hour. This has taken away from the range of beers available from the shop but not, thankfully, from the huge value of the shop as a merchant of local beers. The cost has been the lack of availability of lesser known beers from a wider area…the people of Banbury are either going to have to support local (no bad thing in my opinion) or get in the car!