Old Speckled Hen
Old Speckled Hen began in 1979 as a one-off ale from the Morland brewery in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, brewed for the fiftieth anniversary of the MG car factory in the town; the name comes from a speckled MG runabout that the factory workers had nicknamed. The beer outlived the occasion and, relaunched on draught in 1990, found a market well beyond Morland's own pubs. After Greene King bought Morland and closed the Abingdon brewery in 2000, brewing moved to Bury St Edmunds. Around the amber original a family of Hens has grown, from golden and hoppy ales to a stout and an alcohol-free version.
Beers by Old Speckled Hen
12 beers
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The recurring character behind the beers
Old Speckled Hen brew across 4 style families.
Across these 12 beers, 4 notes keep showing up:
Four notes carry across the range. That's a tight house style — most breweries in the catalogue share just one.
Compared with the wider catalogue of similar styles:
How we measure this
Two thresholds are at work here:
- The signature list shows notes that recur in at least 6% of this brewery's beers. A low bar — enough to flag a pattern, not high enough to call it an exclusive trait.
- The peer comparison below shows only notes where this brewery's coverage differs from similar breweries by at least 20 percentage points. A higher bar — enough to call a real difference, not a nudge.
A note can appear on the signature list without appearing in the peer comparison: it recurs here, but similar breweries do the same thing.
Similar Breweries
hopIQ exclusiveBased on style overlap and flavor profile
About Old Speckled Hen
Old Speckled Hen began in 1979 as a one-off ale from the Morland brewery in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, brewed for the fiftieth anniversary of the MG car factory in the town; the name comes from a speckled MG runabout that the factory workers had nicknamed. The beer outlived the occasion and, relaunched on draught in 1990, found a market well beyond Morland's own pubs. After Greene King bought Morland and closed the Abingdon brewery in 2000, brewing moved to Bury St Edmunds. Around the amber original a family of Hens has grown, from golden and hoppy ales to a stout and an alcohol-free version.
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