Spitfire ales

If you're interested in Spitfires, and made aware of Spitfire beer, you just can't not, can you?

Spitfire beers come from the Shepherd Neame brewery and there are two versions: Golden Ale and Amber Ale. Took us a bit of searching around to get both, but here they are on a sunny Saturday:

I'm not good with tasting notes for beer, so these come from the web.

Golden Ale:

vibrant fruity and flowery hop character balanced with sweet biscuit, caramel and toffee malts combining to deliver a soft bittersweet finish. sweet malt base built upon with delicate floral and pine aromas 

Amber Ale:

gorgeous orange marmalade flavour with sweet biscuits and caramel malts, this then leaves a peppery dry finish on the palate beautifully balanced, blood-orange tinted British bitter with an acutely aromatic allure. Hints of marmalade, red grapes and pepper are thrust from a springboard of warm, mellow malts.

My personal favourite from these two? Amber ale, as it has a bit more depth and character.

'Barbie' Spit

Some Spitfires were adapted for photo reconnaissance (PR) sorties, and they usually had a different paint scheme, pink or blue. Pink paint was used to make them less conspicuous against a sunset sky. I've seen those pink aircraft being referred to as 'Barbie' Spits in at least one source. 

Clearly, I had to have a 'Barbie' Spitfire in the collection; here she is!

And as far as I can tell, this is a picture of the actual aircraft the model is based on.

The pink PR Spitfire seems to only come as a set together with a blue PR Mosquito, so I took that one as an extra, as I definitely wanted a 'Barbie' Spitfire!

Spitfire Makers plaque #10

If you are a loyal follower of this blog, you may have noticed that I posted about the unveiling of the Spitfire Makers plaque #9 and plaque #11, but not plaque #10. Here's why ...

During the unveiling of plaque #10 at Vincent Place in the city centre a few months ago, it turned out that the plaque couldn't be fastened to the building. A temporary plaque was used in the unveiling, but the real plaque is now in place, so we quickly popped by to take some pictures.

Fuselages were built in the Hendy Garage which stood in this place in the 1940s.