Panda Frog Black Ops. Cask vs Keg at Lady Grays

It's not all that often that I get to try the beers of Mordue on trade. At work plenty of sampling goes on but hunting the stuff down on trade is something I would like to do more of. But this week one of the fine pubs of Newcastle, Lady Grey's has decided to take some Panda Frog Black Ops in both cask and key keg form and serve them on the bar at the same time.

This certainly demanded attention (since I had never tried the key keg version), so myself and Matt decided to head down for the purposes of quality control. For those that haven't tried Black Ops, well it's kind of like a Czech style dark lager with the hops switched to heavy dosages of German and New Zealand varieties. The cask version, in short is slightly more raw and uncomprimising. Leafy resiny hops and forest fruit with soft chocolatey-coffee malt in the finish. The keg version is definitely smoother, cleaner and closer to your typical dark lager with the flavours slightly more well composed.

From its inception I knew this beer would be well suited to keg and I'm very chuffed with the results. It might be harder to find but I would definitely advise hunting it out.