Mike Duggan #04 Kölsch
Duggan's Brewery

On tap at the brewpub.

Pours a lightly hazy light amber/yellow, dark for a kolsch, soapy white head forms and settles to a thin ring around the glass, a few lace spots stick.

Smell is alright, very malty, sweet, some caramel, a touch of fruity malts, apricot, some floral and a bit grassy, crackery/biscuit malt, alright.

Taste is similar, quite sweet and malty up front, a big buddy, lots of biscuit, caramel, lightly fruity, crackers and a touch of toast, light floral, almost a touch of burnt grain, some herbal bitterness in the finish.

Mouthfeel is medium bodied with medium carbonation. Same problem I have with a lot of Duggans beers, easy to drink, well made, but not really to style.

Grabbed a half at the brewpub of the two new brews to see what they were all about. Duggan's Kolsch hits the appearance for the style straight on, misses a little with the aroma, has a distracting flaw in the flavour, but ultimately refreshes. By no means is it a bad beer, but its not up to the exacting standards I've come to expect from this operation.

A few specifics. Light gold pour with a thin white head, which still laced well as a film. Nose has lemon, grain and the occasional irritating note of piss. Grass, lemon, tropical fruit and bread make for an excellent base of flavour, and this would have been an outstanding beer were it not for the presence of smoke, which removes all cleanness and muddies everything a little. Medium-light body and medium carbonation is par for the style. Perhaps slightly too sweet to be sessionable.

Not bad and a difficult style to get rave reviews, but there's far better options at the brewpub.

Edit: On a subsequent visit I had some of my wife's kolsch, and both the piss notes and the smoke had cleaned up, so I've adjusted the aroma and taste scores upwards .5 to recognise that. It was certainly a cleaner and better beer the second time round, if still a little short of being a great kolsch.

A good effort, enjoyed at the brewpub. Served somewhat on the cold side. Light yellow body, negligeable head. Neutral aroma, middling mouthfeel. A nice, slightly citrus mild bitterness that was refreshing. I woulddrink this again and again in the summer.

On-tap at Duggan's Brewery, in Toronto.

This is the kind of sunshine, golden sunshine, that makes me happy when skies are gray. And the skies were, in fact, quite cloudy on the day of this visit to the brewpub, but not that, nor the beer's own chilly haze, seemed able to muffle its driven, radiant glow. The head is sliver thin but, to its credit, generates lacing of the same thickness.

The subtle, underlying sweetness in this aroma played the sensory receptors in my nostrils like they were harp strings; my goodness, I began to float right out of my chair! And this from a Kölsch? Indeed, it is an honest and organic sweetness, the kind of pure perfume found only in a fresh-cut piece of fruit, a slice of apple or a pineapple, for instance.

The taste, likewise, is a wholesome and unprocessed collection of subtle, pure flavours: the oven's rising bread, the pineapple's natural sugars, the earth's grassy hops. There are useful words such as "clean" and "quaffable" that describe just how quickly and gracefully the beer slides down the throat. In this case, however, they understate the fact.

The beer is extremely well attenuated and propped up by a sharp and bustling hard water. Water is never an inconsequential ingredient in brewing, especially not with straightforward or ornamented styles such as this; the crisp, carbonate base makes a rather buckram profile out of a beer that would otherwise be quite soft and pliant. No aftertaste.

If this beer were a person, it would be the most friendly, agreeable, easily liked person you'd know. The only people who might be bothered by it are the other brewers out there; for them, seeing Duggan craft such a clean and wonderfully drinkable ale, to capture the character of Cologne so very well, must be an awfully sobering experience.