Durlacher Hof Strong
Frankenthaler Brauhaus

500ml can, day 19 of the Costco Canada 2014 Beer Advent calendar. I'm really starting to get the feeling that there are duplicates here, if not in name, at least in the actual beer within.

This beer pours a clear, medium golden straw colour, with two flabby fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and shiny eggshell white head, which leaves some rather pleasant snow rime lace around the glass as it slowly ebbs away.

It smells of bready, doughy pale malt, corn syrup, yeast, and a generic, bland earthy/leafy hop extract 'bitterness'. The taste is more of the same, erp, with the grainy, doughy, and yeasty malt sweetness, a hint of sugary drupe fruit, paint thinner, and an at least consistent stock noble hop attempt at bittering balance.

The carbonation is quite low, as to be taken for absent at times, the body an adequate medium weight, I suppose, but too clammy and sticky to enter into any sort of discussion concerning smoothness. It finishes on the sweet side, the corn/unattenuated malt, and perhaps gang-piling alcohol all not knowing what they have wrought.

Blah - another barely palatable boozed-up sugar-fest, one that could fit right in with the malt liquor cabal Stateside, and maybe even lead it. But no, this is European, so it's still an adjunct-free lager, and still a poor one at that. Maybe good for beer can chicken, but the trials for that have yet to be done.