Almond Brown Ale
Whistle Stop Restaurant & Woodman Brewery

 

Reviewed from old session notes.

Pours out an extremely turbid and murky sort of light brown muddy lake water in color with tons of swirling particulate matter... thin white frothy cap of fizz dies back to nothing in a second or two even as I pour out the bottle..*KERPLUNK*

Wait, what was that? There was an actual almond included in my bottle, which performed a splashdown into my glass! Very amusing and playful, but on this matter my free advice to the brewer would be to indicate some kind of warning on the label in future batches that there is a whole almond floating around in there, so that some random idiot drunken philistine would think twice before litigating if he were to swig directly from the bottle and choke on the almond.

Smells like a mixture of almond toffee, mild whiffs of milk chocolate fudge bars, and even more faintly like werther's original candies. Tastes a lot dryer than the nose lets on, thankfully. Sadly, it also tastes a lot thinner and milder than the nose would have you expect as well. There is an appropriate flourish of noble style hopping used as garnishment, but sadly it rests upon a malt base that IMHO comes across as muddled and murky. It never quite achieves a certain level of nuttiness or toastiness that I have come to expect from brown ales. The low level of nutty flavor is really perplexing considering there actually was an almond soaking in the bottle. Also, the texture is just a bit too thick and undercarbonated for my personal tastes. It just needs to be about 10% thinner in character to hit my sweet spot. This brew needs some fine tuning before it can shine.

"English style brown ale featuring real almonds"

Fizzy foam that rapidly fades away to nothing. Soon enough there's zero foam at all. Orange, not brown oddly enough. Unfiltered and a little bit murky. Second bottle is strikingly clear and looks like a lager. Second pour generates a little more foam, with a little bit of lace even, but that doesn't excuse the fact that this "brown ale" is nearly straw gold in color.

Astringent with light hop bitterness, very little almond character in the smell or taste. Tastes like watery homebrew unfortunately. Overattenuated... thin and overly carbed, fizzy. Some vague notes of tangy citrus rind from the hops, but little else. He makes some good beers, but this isn't one of them. Back to the drawing board with this one.