Prickly Pike Pilsner
Northwoods Brewpub and Grill

 

 

 

 

The label looks like it was created in 1992 using MS Paint or possibly an Amiga 500. This is what bad typography looks like, but i'll digress.

It says Kolsch on the label, but looks and smells more like a pale ale. Color is a dull golden orange, with some sticky white lacing crowning the glass. A floating island of skim remains after the first few sips. Initial pour yields a finger of creamy foam that sticks around for a bit.

Smells like caramel or specialty malt. Overly sweet, fresh hot wort, also fish food. Wet dishrag as it warms, mmm.

Feels astringent with some caramel and hardtack, wet barley, grape nuts cereal. Bitter and blah, watery. Something is pretty amiss here, aside from the style miscategorization. Kind of a jarring, unfinished, weak attempt at a beer. The more I try to drink it, the less I like it.

They say that it is wise not to judge a book by its cover. Well...judging this beer by its label would have been a wise decision. The label looks like it was created by some guy who knows nothing about art or marketing, and was done so in his basement. That same guy apparently doesn't know much about beer styles as the label states this beer is both a pilsner and a kolsch. Perhaps, this is the first beer I've heard of that was simultaneously brewed with both lager and ale yeast strains, but I highly doubt it. It does, however, have the distinction of being the one beer I've drank that tasted the most like a Werther's Original. Now onto the tasting note...

This beer pours a cloudy pale orange color. The head is a half inch in height, and recedes quickly into sparse lacing. This beer looks nothing like a pilsner or a kolsch (as the label states it is both styles). The aroma is of butterscotch candy, and the taste is similar. The mouthfeel is medium bodied with almost no carbonation. Overall, this is an awful beer. It is clear the yeast went wild, and produced a ton of diacetyl. This beer should have been poured down the drain by the brewer. Instead, I bought it as I wanted to try something new, and now I am the one who has to pour it down the drain.

I guess I'll break from the previous two reviews, i think this is pretty good.

Golden colored berw topped by a gentle white head that forms from a constant stream of rising bubbles. Scent is light sweet malt with a subtle hop presence. First thing i notices is the fullness of the body. Nice light malt front followed by a fair amount of bitter hops.

Drab, off-gold color, virtually no head.

Much like the pale ale I just had, only slightly hoppier, still stuck with this caramel-y sweetness. Odd, for a pils, though it is clean, and not terrible. On we go...

Taste: weird. Hot on first swallow, too fierce with the hops, too unfriendly to the tongue, with little to back it up. Mouthfeel is nothing, again, thin and watery, with the unpleasant memory of the foretaste lingering in the mind.

"Prickly" is an apt word for this beer, but you really don't want that in your pilsner, now, do you?

I notice on the label they're calling it a kolsch. Nuh-uh, fellas. It's not even close, and it's barely drinkable.

This was not on tap at the brewpub, and the beers I did have there were okay, so I hope it’s just a problem with their bottling line because this had a big butterscotch aroma when we popped the cap. Way too bitter for the style, too. And yes, the label says both "Kölsch" and "Pilsner," while the description (on-line and on their beer list) calls it an "ale.