Pigskin Pilsner
Lake of Bays Brewing Company

 

1.89L growler-style bottle, with a cool tactile beaded football-esque label - and a normally stupid format to ship clear across the country, but hey, not a bad choice for my birthday evening celebrations, for numerous reasons I won't cite here. Also, the warning on the bottom of the back label is fairly amusing.

This beer pours a crystal clear, pale golden yellow colour, with three fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and chunky dirty white head, which leaves some strangely apt raincloud lace around the glass as it slowly sinks away.

It smells of bready, crackery pale malt, a strong hard water flintiness, old-school gasohol, and decent earthy, leafy, spicy, and grassy hops. The taste is more of the same - a solid bready and doughy malt graininess, hints of overripe red apples, mild fuel-pump esters, white saltine crackers, and steady leafy, weedy, and grassy noble hops.

The bubbles are mostly peppy and adventurous in their frothy probings of my semi-pro palate, the body a solid medium weight, and kind of smooth, the hops and gasoline edginess making a certain kind of ingress here. It finishes off-dry, the graininess still large and very much in charge of the offensive formation, as it were.

A more or less agreeable version of the style, my only complaint, if I were to offer one, is that the hops could be a tad more aggressive (not all Czech Saaz up in there, but y'know). Overall - easy to drink, even in the proffered behemoth vessel, and a genial kick-off to yet another personal year of beer imbibing.

 

 

1.89 L growler picked up at the LCBO; packaged on Oct 22 2014 and served well-chilled. I've passed on this one a few times over the last 3 weeks, mostly because I'm not sold on this brewery's ability to make good session lagers, but today I decided to just bite the bullet and try it.

Pours a pale golden-straw colour, topped with one finger of white froth that fizzles itself out of existence over the next two minutes or so. A soapy film survives at the surface, along with a thin collar and a few splotches of lace. It looks fine, and the aroma does immediately remind me of a few imported German lagers, so nothing is out of sorts at this juncture. Grainy malt sweetness, a hint of honey, grassy hops and lemony citrus blend together to generate an approachable, if uninteresting bouquet.

This is actually fine for what it is, and a much cleaner-tasting pale lager than their other two (Rock Cut and Top Shelf Classic). Very simple flavour profile - grainy, pale barley malts provide a somewhat subtle underlying sweetness; the Hallertauer hops counter this in the latter half of the profile, providing notes of grassy hay, lemony citrus pith and a vaguely floral bitterness that fades into the aftertaste. A little hoppier than some examples of the style (24 IBUs), but certainly not enough to turn off the pilsner enthusiasts. Light-bodied, with crisp, prickly carbonation that falls a step or two below the levels found in a typical macro lager.

Final Grade: 3.56, a B grade. Pigskin Pilsner is a boring beer, but it's not necessarily a bad one. It's a solid interpretation of your basic imported German lager - fans of that sort of beer will probably find this one to be pretty agreeable, but the average BA will probably just yawn, give it a mediocre grade and then move on to something else. Worth a pick-up if you're a fan of macro fare/imported lagers, and you're in the mood for a large serving of something that you can just gulp down without overanalyzing it. In terms of quality, I'd rank this above their other two pale lagers - but even if they begin distributing Pigskin in a more convenient format, I probably wouldn't be picking it up regularly.