Balcone's Fault Pale Malt
Great Grains Brewery, Inc.

Pours a light orange, I syuppose. Reasonable head height but no density to it at all - the head is entirely gone in a flash.
And then, well, and then I tasted it. Now, a funny thing happened right after I did... My newborn son had a big old messy poop. Now, that just shows that he's in tune with the beer thing. This beer was so nasty I wouldn't even cook with it. Bleh.

Pours a golden amber with little head, disappearing quickly. Nose is grassy with a little charcoal.

Taste is flat and mildly malted. Hops is present but a little pungent and tart, not at all smooth like a bitter. Mouthfeel is watery and soapy. Rice and tea flavors, also, with everything mellowing out a bit as it warms.

Not terrible, but not terribly good, either.

Re-review: 04-02-2004

I seem to have lucked in to a clean batch of Great Grains, so I'm re-reviewing.

The uninfected version has a small, cream-white head and a clear, amber-brown body. Dark tea-colored. Smell is nutty, with dark caramel. The front is sourish, but not GG-cider-sour. It's more like a rye beer sour grain. A little chocolate appears in the dark, caramel middle, capped off by a bitter, nutty crackers finish. Not a great beer, but not a vile one either.

=O=

Original review: 03-17-2003 (2.0, 2.0, 2.5, 1.5, 2.0 = 2.15)

Bought locally (Grapevine refrigerated shelves), a couple of days in my fridge, reviewed 45F-60F.

Another big pour went unrewarded in head. (For the record, there might have been ten seconds of tiny, cream-colored head if I'm not hallucinating). The beer is just as flat as something that's really flat. The color is murky brownish with hints of red highlight. Sort of like iced tea in a dirty glass.

The smell is malt, some chocolate with overtones of flatulence. The front shows some citrus, a little bit of cream. The middle is the trademark GG apples, a little chocolate and sour stink. The finish is tea. The feel is thin, flat, watery.

Ok. Overall this beer is really quite awful, but it holds some fascination (kind of like a wreck on the interstate). There are some tasty notes hidden in there: the cream and chocolate are quite nice if you look for them. The first time I tried this (a couple of years ago) I poured it out, thinking it spoiled. But after sampling almost all the GG brews, I believe that's just the way it tastes. I can now actually drink this one.

This is supposed to be a pale ale? It pours a light to medium brown color with virtually no head, and what little there is vanished immediately. The aroma is an odd mixture of sweet malts and sour apples. The flavor is even stranger. It’s sweet and fruity but has an underlying sourness to it. A very unusual (but not in a good way) beer.

Balcone's Fault Pale Malt (which is actually 4% ABV--3% by weight) is the lightest of the light beers brewed by Great Grains. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the specific flavors, aromas and attributes of this beer, because currently (like all of the Great Grains beers), Pale Malt is suffering from some sort of infection. If bought VERY fresh (like the day that Alex or Tim deliver the beer to the store from the brewery), the beer has some interesting malt flavors, but even then, there's a faint sour apple flavor that permeates all the other flavors. Let the beer sit for a few days (in the fridge, sealed in the bottle) and the sourness will be almost overwhelming. I believe this flavor tends to be categorized as aceteldehyde in beer competitions, but I'm not positive that's what's going on here... Anyway, I'm going to wait a few months and see if Alex and Tim the brewer can straighten this out. At that point, perhaps I'll re-rate Pale Malt.

Pours a medium brown with a slight haziness due to sediment, one inch head vanishes completely inside of thirty seconds. Lively carbonation, no lace whatsoever. Quite sweet caramel and toffee aroma. Taste is extremely sweet and in fact tastes very much like sweetened ice tea absent lemon with just a hint of hop bitterness at the finish. Not at all like a pale ale or any sort of beer I have had, more like one of the "natural" soda alternatives or "health" beverages. Peculiar to say the least.

There was no head. Flat. It has a very funky, yeasty flavor. A little odd. Can't decide if I hate it.