IHATE to sound biased from the outset, but I’ve always enjoyed Red Willow’s beer. They’ve always done a very good job of creating very flavoursome ales that are supremely, and often ruinously, drinkable.

Ageless, their American-style India Pale Ale, is the main culprit (though not to everyone’s taste I’m sure). Much more insidious is Wreckless; it’s slightly lower in alcohol but a devilish pale ale if ever I met one. Smokeless, meanwhile, has always been a favourite of mine in the ever enjoyable category of smoked porters, a category that people really should delve into more often.

Most smoked beers contain smoked malt, kilned over beech wood that can give beer a flavour reminiscent of Bavarian sausages and highly processed ‘Austrian cheese’ sold in plastic orange sausage wrappers. It’s a bit of a Marmite genre because of this.

Red Willow, however, flavour Smokeless with a fistful of chipotle peppers, and the result is a much less divisive articulation of the style.

Pouring a deep brown, Smokeless gives toffee popcorn and milk chocolate on the nose, with a faint suggestion of pepper and camp-fire smoke. Sweet initially, the predominant flavour is an almost fudgey, vanilla-infused chocolate with the distant tang of peppers making itself increasingly apparent. The chillis come to the fore in the finish, adding an almost savoury barbeque spice counterpoint. A staccato of spice plays about the tongue in the finish, adding a delicate warmth, but never causing any real heat or pain. As delicately balanced as it is delicious, this isn’t a spicy beer made for a painful gimmick. Smokeless is just one of the best smoked porters around.

Recommended by Michael Bates, Trembling Madness, 48 Stonegate, York Twitter: @tremblingmad