Wychwood Brewery's Dry Neck Beer Review

I seem to be working my way through the Wychwood Brewery beer selection quite quickly, mainly because they're so cheap and readily available. I picked up Dry Neck for the ridiculously low price of £1 from Morrison's a couple of days ago along with a few other bargain beers. Wychwood are based in Witney in Oxfordshire, so pretty much all I know about Witney is that I like their brewery, and it's where former PM David Cameron was an MP. I'll leave you guys to decide which has made the greater contribution to the country.  

I always love the style of Wychwood beers, they just feel like they are made for everyone's favourite time of year, Halloween. Dry Neck comes in a suitably weird 500ml bottle featuring a pretty unusual character with a beak, I'm not going to speculate on who or what it is. There's a rather tame 4% alcohol content, but given that its major selling point seems to be that it's so refreshing it'll sooth even the driest of throats I guess that's reasonable. While the beer starts off pretty lively the head dissipates quickly leaving just a slither on top of a quite pretty clear golden body. It looks pretty good.

The aroma isn't overly strong but it's fruity, with some citrus scents. It also smells fairly sweet, but it's certainly not unpleasant. Dry Neck seems like it could be a decent hoppy golden beer, lets hope so anyway. The texture is really light, almost like drinking water, so I can't argue that it feels refreshing. Should a beer get points for this though? Sure it's great that it's refreshing and on a nice warm day in a beer garden it might be just what you want, but regardless it'll dehydrate you in the end, that's just the nature of the beast.

Maybe I should have had this beer in July not January, I certainly think it feels like a summer ale. While the texture is indeed refreshing the taste is quite bland. There's a few fruity and citrus hops in there, and they're blended together reasonably well but it's not outstanding, and I'm really looking for outstanding beers. I may try Dry Neck again in the summer just to see if it's a little more inspiring then, but for now I'm going to give Dry Neck from Wychwood Brewery a meagre 3 out of 10. Come on Wychwood get back to making beers that really taste of something.