Marstons 61 Deep Pale Ale Beer Review

61 Deep from Marston's is another from my hoppy LIDL 6 beers for £6.99 selection. So far they've been a bit of a mixed bag, but at only just over £1 a bottle I can't really complain too much. Marston's are a huge brewery based in Burton Upon Trent. They also own loads of pubs and several other breweries, including Jennings and Wychwood, so they're doing pretty well. This is yet another 2021 lockdown beer, and great as it is to be drinking nice cheap bottles I'm really starting to miss the pub, hopefully this beer will take my mind off been stuck at home though.

61 Deep is so named because it's the depth in meters of the well at the brewery, I'm just hoping it tastes better than well water. The 500ml bottle featuring a deep sea diver is nice enough, and the 4.1% alcohol content puts it very much in the session beer range. As a rule I'm not much of a pale ale drinker but a few have surprised me lately so I'm hoping this will be another. The beer pours a pretty clear gold with an initially decent white head, but that disappears pretty quickly. It very much looks like you'd expect a pale ale to look.

The 61 Deep aroma is a fairly straight forward citrus hops smell, there's some malts and grain in there too, but really it's nothing spectacular. So far everything points to Marston's having created yet another normal, bland pale ale. The texture is reasonably smooth and light. It really is starting to feel like this is a summer time beer garden drink rather than a late January lockdown offering, but the bottle is very much open now so I'm not going to wait.

The taste is pretty zesty, there's lots of hops and citrus, but there's very little else. The beer is much livelier than it looks and if I'm honest I don't like it very much. There's a bit of a bitter aftertaste which doesn't really sit well with the rest of the flavours, and the hops don't feel particularly well balanced. I'm sure as a refreshing alternative to a lager on a warm day this beer probably has its place, but in the UK that's pretty niche. I'm going to give 61 Deep Pale Ale from Marston's Brewery 3 out of 10. It's just not very good.