Fuller's frustrations

Despite Fuller's First Draught saying that their IPA is the seasonal beer for September it's not on in any of our local Fuller's pubs so we ended up staying in on Saturday.

We did have a couple of bottles of Discovery as it's going cheap in the local Waitrose. I've always found this beer a bit bland but the recipe has been tweaked so I thought it was worth a try at the bargain rate it was going for.  

The changes that have been made are supposed to give it more body and a zestier hoppier flavour. Sadly it hasn't worked at all as both me and the lovely Lisa found it almost entirely free of any flavour. Definitely the worst beer from Fuller's.

The blurb written about the changes that have been made has an interesting comment about the cask version "... the beer is no longer filtered allowing the yeast to do its job properly in the cask, and finally, we have asked that the cellarman allow the beer to drop bright for an extra 24 hours".

I have heard that London Pride drops bright with unseemly haste but this seems to confirm that Fuller's are filtering at least some of their cask beers. And when I cultured the yeast from a bottle of 1845 I didn't find much viable yeast there either. 

I'm a big fan of Fuller's, and the quest to find their IPA will continue, but they do seem to be up to something. I hope the beer quality doesn't drop off.