Here’s a beer that you see all the time, but probably don’t pay a great deal of attention to. Like the poor, death and taxes – Marston’s Pedigree will always be with us…but in an understated, unobtrusive sort of way.
Arriving a very pleasant chestnut-brown colour and topped with the whitest of heads, it certainly looks the part. Good.
The aroma instantly transports me to my youth. Pedigree smells like the pints of beer that Dads used to drink out of dimpled, handled glasses in pub gardens in the summer. It’s all malt and minerals and flintyness. In a brief moment of childhood reverie I think I also caught the faintest whiff of Golden Wonder beef-flavoured crisps, too…
Pedigree is by no means a complex drop, it’s not in possession of a huge and satsifying malt body, either. It’s just a good beer. Not revelatory or world-shaking. It’s honest, solid, tasty and refreshing. A rounded malty-nuttiness (or nutty rounded-maltiness) completes the picture.
Pick this up in volume for the bargain price of £1.25 a pop from Aldi or Lidl or somewhere like that and take it to a picnic, party, barbeque or whatever. It’ll all get gratefully drunk and won’t get in the way of the conversation or anything…
yeastismybitch 
I agree! In these days full of craft beers it’s easy to forget the good old ales of our youth! This and Banks’s bitter for me!
Ah. There’s a review of Banks’s on the site somewhere. I liked that a lot too, espesh at a quid a bottle.. :o)
A quality brew. They serve it in a lot of pubs in my neck of the woods, so it’s a good default beer to hammer when there’s no decent cask on. Infinitely better than other cooking brews like John Smith Smooth and Boddington
A good point well made, Jon. I definitely prefer it to the mass-market ditchwater…