Star Trek Red Shirt Ale
Garrison Brewing Company

650ml bottle - another release from the Federation of Beer marketing company, this time making an ode to that classic Trekkie trope, those doomed red shirted minions.

This beer pours a clear, dark orange-brick brown colour, with three flabby fingers of puffy, rocky, and shiny beige head, which leaves some thickly splattered lace around the glass as it lazily sinks out of sight.

It smells of bready and doughy caramel malt, muted domestic citrus rind, a bit of wet crackers, and some weak leafy, herbal, and floral green hop bitters. The taste is grainy and bready caramel malt, a tinge of biscuity toffee, some sort of muddled citrus and pome fruitiness, ephemeral smoky notes (set yer phasers on stun!), and more earthy, weedy, and musky floral verdant hoppiness.

The carbonation is quite soft in its palate-coddling frothiness, the body a decent medium weight, and generally smooth, as the hops seem to actually give a shit about obeying the campsite rule here. It finishes well off-dry, the base malt and attendant fruitiness not ceding the fort to any of these upstart hoppy interlopers.

Overall, I gotta say that this is one of the better Canadian-made red ales that I have come across in recent times - nice and hoppy, but not egregiously so, and with absolutely no off-flavours (it's still a bloody shame that I even have to make that caveat). A pretty good brew if you're Star Trek agnostic, and a damned fine one if you're a huge fan, I would imagine.