Ah.
I have once again returned to Beers of the World, and once again I've spent way too much money. I have 3 cases of top quality brews, though. Hopefully some of the rest of you will join me in doing some reviews.
It's spring now, and for my beer drinking, that means hops. I picked up a number of imperial IPAs and a couple other hoppy brews to help shake off the winter cold. Hops is a flower, after all. The other thing I'll be exploring in this latest purchase is beer in a can. Based on reports in this thread, beer in a can, can in fact be good. I picked up all the canned microbrews in cans I could find so I could evaluate this for myself. What I'd really like is to get a bottled and canned version of the same beer so that the scientist in me will have a proper control, but I wasn't able to find any of that. I'll just have to do the best I, umm, can. I also picked up a few Belgian odds and ends, just because I can't help myself.
I'll probably do a couple reviews tonight, and my first will be one of the canned beers. The people touting Old Chub, the Scotch ale from the Oskar Blues in CO were the ones who first got my attention about canned beer, so it's fitting that I review it first. I paid $9.35 for a sixer of this beer that weighs in at a hefty 8.0%.
The beer pours a nice dark brown with a respectable head.
It smells like a standard Scotch ale, and that means sweet dark malt. There's almost no trace of hops. There is a hint of dark dried fruits like raisins, dates, and figs. The flavor is right in line with the aroma. It's mostly a sweet, rich dark malt. There is just a hint of the dark dried fruits, and a little smoke that I didn't get in the smell. I wouldn't have thought this was an 8% beer, though. I would have guessed 6-7%, and only because of the sweetness, not because of the flavor of alcohol. This beer isn't the most exciting thing I've ever had, but I'm not always in the mood for exciting. It'd be a pretty good staple beer for me. I'm going to award it [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img][img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img][img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img]. It's definitely the tastiest thing I've ever had from an aluminum can, surpassing Guinness and Coke, I suppose, not that they were the stiffest competition. I didn't detect any funny flavors imparted to it from the can; I would have believed that this was bottled beer if someone handed it to me already in the glass. OTOH, I can't really say that the can has anything going for it unless you're in some sort of abusive environment where bottles might be more easily broken. At this point, I'll believe that beer in cans can be good, but I won't be going out of my way to buy canned beer specifically.