Mad '40' Malt Liquor
Mikkeller ApS

 

 

330ml bottle. This is part of the Mad* series of collaborations with chefs, celebrities, etc., that Mikkeller seems keen on, and this time it's a to-do with Alex Atala, apparently a famous Brazilian chef and restauranteur. So why is there a picture of a black dude on the labe...ooooh, right.

This beer pours a slightly hazy, medium copper amber hue, with three copious fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and bubbly ecru head, which leaves some nicely layered cirrus cloud lace around the glass as it evenly fades away.

It smells quite strongly of fresh squeezed (sorry, Deschutes!) orange and red Texas grapefruit juice, a stoney flintiness, crackery pale malt, and a bit of further leafy, weedy, and certainly perfumed hops. The taste is still big on the semi-sweet citrus flesh and muddled tropical fruit notes, but now duly tainted with a shot of yer middle-shelf vodka, understated pine and floral forest detritus, grainy, softly gritty pale and caramel malt, and a testy hard water rocky essence.

The carbonation is pretty average, in an acceptably frothy manner, the body a solid medium-heavy weight for the purported 'style', and smooth and creamy, and yadda yadda yadda. It finishes on the sweet side, tropical and domestic orchard fruit rockin' whatever passes for a casbah around here.

So when is that what we call a rose, not a rose (paraphrasing, lit majors)? Well, exhibit A, fellow imbibers, is before me, as it only required a sniff test, but I just had to go way beyond that, to determine that this is no mere Malt Likka, or even a sassed-up Imperial Pilsner - this has India, um, 'pale', (more) um, 'ale' written all over it. Yeah, that's what this is - mislabeled and generally very tasty.