THERE’S no doubt that this Christmas will be different to previous years, despite Boris’s best attempts to be the anti-Grinch and grant you permission to throw open your doors, providing it’s only to two other households, and they don’t touch anything, and bath in bleach beforehand and, preferably, bring their own food and disposable cutlery.
Apart from that, though, it’ll just be like any other normal Christmas and if you mask up and brave the aisles of your local supermarket, you’ll see all the old favourites crammed on to the shelf waiting to be shoved into your trolley and, at a later stage, your gob.
One such festive treat (although you can get them at any other time of the year) is the Terry’s Chocolate Orange – once hawked on TV by Lenny Henry’s (and Jennifer Saunders’s, for that matter) former better half.
Opened with a gentle tap, it’s one of those confections that is intended to be chipped away at over the Yuletide, but instead ends up getting gobbled up during a viewing marathon of Morecambe and Wise reruns.
Still, the chocolate orange always feels a bit decadent and it was with a similar degree of decadence, therefore, that I cracked open a 330ml can of The Dark Druid Chocolate Orange stout from White Hag.
The great thing about White Hag is not only do you get a beer, you also get a story and I hope for all our sakes that they don’t run out of tales of Irish mythology any time soon.
The Dark Druid is actually a series of pastry stouts, the chocolate orange being the third instalment. The druid in question chopped the mistletoe off the sacred oak tree in winter, mistletoe being a symbol of life in the winter months.
To the beer itself, and when the flavours are so clearly advertised, it’s hard not to escape the natural assumption that chocolate and orange will be well represented. A quick whiff of the off-white head nails the dark chocolate and orange aromas.
The mouthfeel is smooth and silky, but there’s a fullness to it, and while the chocolate in the aromas is more dark and bitter, the chocolate flavours are creamier and more luxurious. There’s a sweet and juicy orange flavour laced through the whole thing and at 5.5 per cent, it’s only the sweetness that would prevent you polishing off a few in front of the telly.
