The Fabulator
Central City Brewers + Distillers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

330ml bottle, day 8 of the 2015 Craft Crossing Calendar, a 'collaborative' effort once again between Parallel 49 and Central City brewing. The Fabulator is apparently named after CC's own Fabian Specht, who must be a fan of the smoke.

This beer pours a clear, bright medium red-brick amber colour, with one finger of puffy, loosely foamy, and mostly bubbly beige head, which leaves a bit of Tron-esque attack ship lace around the glass as things lazily recede.

It smells of meaty and grainy smoked pale malt, a bit of normally weird fishiness, bittersweet cocoa powder, ethereal dark orchard fruit, and singed earthy, leafy, and weedy hops. The taste is semi-sweet, well-roasted caramel malt, a mixed bag of wan, bacon-led meatiness, fading coffee-flecked chocolate notes, middling dark sugar, and some still besieged weedy, herbal, and grassy noble hop bitterness.

The bubbles are fairly understated in their quotidian frothiness, the body a sturdy middleweight, and actually near-smooth, as the smoke kind of wafts overhead, not really touching down to cause any tornado-like damage here. It finishes off-dry, the base malt re-asserting its position, while the smoke, fruit, and yep, hops flail about, seemingly without direction.

A nice stab at this esoteric northern German style, but the word 'fab' is unfortunately doomed to be left at the door (was Fabio German? Excuse me if I don't look that up). Smoky, sure, but in a kind of amateur sense, when other New World (and even Canadian) breweries have already nailed their emulations of said brew.