Cereal Killer
Phillips Brewing & Malting Co.

 

 

You can count on Phillips to provide an interesting experience. The campy label and cheesy name work as well as the beer. It is good looking with a rye and candy yeast smell. The overall taste profile works for me, with the rye spice providing an uplifting finish. Its mild carbonation and sunny disposition make this a tasty rye beer - not always an easy balance to strike.

 

Pours a clear coppery brown colour with a finger thick beige head that shrinks to a mousse like layer covering the top. The nose leads with sweet malts, citrus hop and mild spice. The flavour leads with the malt, followed by the rye, the hop flavour kind of disappears leaving only a slight bitterness on the finish. The mouthfeel is in the medium range with a middle of the road carbonation. An okay Imperial Lager but not the show stopper it could be.

 

Phillips Brewing 'Cereal Killer Imperial Rye Lager' @ 7.2% , served from a 650 ml bottle purchased for $6.05
A-pour is gold from the bottle to a clear amber in the glass with a small off-white head leaving a fine streaky lace along the pint
S-rye
T-big tasting Imperial crisp lager with a slight bitter swallow
MF-decent carbonation , feels big bodied , ABV seems well hidden
Ov-ok rye beer
prost LampertLand

650ml bottle. This appear to be another style-fucker kind of deal - an Imperial-ish Lager, dosed with a 'murderous amount of rye'. Still, cool name and branding, as per usual.

This beer pours a clear, bright medium copper amber colour, with two chubby fingers of puffy, finely foamy, and somewhat bubbly off-white head, which leaves some spooky swirling mist lace around the glass as it evenly bleeds away.

It smells of biscuity, grainy pale malt, a subtle spicy rye insurgency, mild apple and underripe pear fruity notes, and zingy leafy, grassy, and floral hops. The taste is bready and lightly doughy caramel malt, some soft grainy rye acerbity, a faint hard water flinty character, muddled pome fruitiness, and tame earthy, leafy, and grassy hop bitters.

The bubbles are decently distributed in their supportive and sometimes playful frothiness, the body a solid middleweight for whatever style this purports to be, and mostly smooth, maybe a bit of peppery rye otherness failing to make its intended dent here. It finishes on a drying swing, the rye spiciness starting to find other, higher gears, and that elevated, near 15-proof booze still nowhere to be seen.

Wow - neat. What I get here is something akin to a saucy ESB, one gently assailed by extra alcohol and a differentiated malt - and it works. This cereal-adjusted brew is certainly no killer, but it will sweet-talk you into drinking it at perhaps a more rapid pace than one should.