It's not the usual place I would buy bottled beer from, but when you realise that the beer is actually brewed by some great breweries it made me wonder if this was just another white labelled product or have the breweries actually changed the recipe for M&S. Recently Chris McBride on twitter mentioned that he was doing a side by side taste test between the Marks and Spencer Cornish IPA and Proper Job IPA (both by St Austell) and seeing that I have recently had a amazing pint of Proper Job, I thought I would also pick up a bottle of M&S Cornish IPA for a test.

I think some will be instantly recognisable, like the Southwold Winter Beer from Adnams, the Staffordshire IPA by Marston’s and the London Porter by Meantime of Greenwich - even if they do have a slightly different ABV, a tweak in the recipe or not be bottle conditioned.

All we need now is for a popular beer blog to take up the challenge and do blind taste tests of the M&S beers next to the 'likely' brewery sourced bottles and let us have the results.

The other good thing about picking up the M&S beer was the price deal. They are currently running 'buy 6 for the price of 5' and to my surprise they also knocked off a further 10% under the 'buy 6 wines and get 10% off' deal ... strange but true, check out the receipt on twitpic ...

Related blog posts from richard.mackney.com:

• Brewing Beer at Nutbrook Brewery (video)
• Stout Cakes
• BEER from BEERmerchants.com (video)
• Twitter Taste Live