This has probably become my favorite beer style after brewing only one batch of it. I’d like to find a couple good commercial versions of it. I tried scouring Beer Advocate but the results were pretty scarce.
Can anyone make a recommendation of one I can find on the shelf?
McEwan’s and Belhaven are two Scottish import examples you can find fairly often in good liquor stores. They’re both good if you can get them reasonably fresh.
They McEwan’s and Belhaven products in the use are not 60 shilling examples.
Despite what the BJCP guidelines suggest, 60 shilling is not a smaller version of 80 shilling (or vice versa). Belhaven 60/- is darker in color than Belhaven 80/- (exported as Belhaven Scottish Ale) and is in fact too dark for the style despite being the first listed classic example.
The 2008 BJCP subcategories 9a-9c are good at describing US home brewed and commercially brewed Scottish Ales and a pretty poor job of describing beer in Scotland. I hope this is one of the areas in which the 2014 guidelines will contain corrections as divorcing the guidelines from reality to cater to the local audience only works for a local organization.
+1 on the recommendation to avoid peated malt in this style. With a proper ferment, the scottish yeast does through a hint of smokey phenol. I would have to say that a better work around than peated is to use a small percentage of brown malt. It has a hint of smokiness.