The Stonehenge Ales brewery at Netheravon has come up with a new beer in honour of the many crop patterns that appear in Wiltshire fields each summer.

Stig and Anna Marie Andersen, who took over the independent brewery from its founder Tony Bunce in 1993, are fascinated by the weird and wonderful shapes that show up each year.

Mrs Andersen is studying fine art at Winchester College and said that, regardless of whether the crop patterns were man-made or not, they had become an art form in their own right, attracting tourists from all over the world.

The new beer reaches local pubs this week and is called Glyph, a name chosen by Mrs Andersen as it represents the hieroglyphs the crop patterns might or might not be although their messages so far remain undeciphered.

The logo on the Glyph beermats shows the pictogram dubbed Led Zeppelin that appeared in fields at Alton Barnes 20 years ago.

“Now, 20 years on, the new beer Glyph, manifests itself at Stonehenge Ales in celebration of that formation,” said Mrs Andersen.

The new light amber beer, which has an ABV of 4.5 per cent, also has one mystical ingredient – aromatic Chinook hops grown on the tribal lands in America of the Chinook tribe.

From each batch of Glyph produced the brewery will be making a donation to the Crop Circle Connector web site, which Mrs Andersen said was an independent site respected world-wide.