Mystery Beer Two (2025)
Lake of Bays Brewing Company

473 mL can from the LCBO, included in their 2025 Toasty Toes sampler pack. Dated Sep 25 2025 and served barely chilled.

Pours a clear pale yellow colour, capped with two fingers of soapy, foamy white head that gradually fades over the next four or five minutes. It leaves behind a messy coat of lace as it recedes, with a creamy collar and thin cap holding steady on the surface. The aroma is clean and subtle, offering up hints of grainy, bready malts, lemon peel, doughy sweetness and floral hops.

Not an exciting or unique beer, but it does seem to be a reasonably well-made German lager of some type or another. The malts are dominant, providing a richly grainy, bready flavour profile that is punctuated with hints of grassy, spicy hops and restrained citrus peel bitterness. Mildly grainy aftertaste that doesn't linger. Light in body, with fairly low carbonation that gently tickles the tongue; the mouthfeel is smooth and satisfying. I drink a lot of pilsners and helles lagers on a weekly basis, and this pale lager would slot into my rotation just fine.

Final Grade: 3.79, a B+. Based entirely upon its spartan ingredients list, my original assumption was that Mystery Beer Two was a German pilsner... but upon further review, I'm leaning more towards a helles lager. That's mostly because the noble hop characteristics are rather subdued by pilsner standards - not entirely absent, of course, but it's the grainy, bready malt bill that does most of the heavy lifting. In any event, it's a decent German-ish lager, and a far sight better than Mystery Beer One (which was some sort of chocolate chip cookie stout). I would consider buying this again as a single, but for the time being, I'll just head over to the Lake of Bays website to vote for this beer.