Bad Hare Chocolate Cherry Stout
Rhinelander Brewing Company

I should know better. I cannot recall a Minhas beer I have raved about (or bought a second time, for that matter.) This offering is cherry chocolate in a Cherry Blossom kind of way - sweet, fake fruit drizzled in syrup that looks suspiciously like semen. Back to the beer - flat, thin, and rather dissatisfying. Try the bargain beer, they said. It's "not bad", they said...

Enjoyed on a winter's morning, yay before the sun; I was awakened from the stiff pitch of night, into a thermal fog, amber with streetlight.

The smell - mildew; the feel - metallic. The look of sandy shores, by dark bays of freshwater.

 

650ml bottle. The 'fresh' cherries and chocolate square imagery on the label seem to be laid out in a certain Bachelor rose ceremony sort of way. Ick. Less than a Blue Laurier, this one cost me at my source in Edmonchuk for such things, but to what end, I say?

This beer pours a fairly solid black, with prominent basal cola highlights, and three fingers of puffy, somewhat rocky, and loosely bubbly beige head, which leaves a decent enough array of spooky webbed lace around the glass as things fall precipitously away.

It smells of cheap department store chalky chocolate, a sort of otherworldly in its fakeness fruity cherry essence (Halls lozenges, but not, y'know?), spoiled milk, stale caramel malt, and barely a hint of a middling earthy weediness to account for the purported IBUs. The taste is more of the same - acrid dry cocoa, pithy cherry skin and other fruity detritus save the actual flesh, weakly caramelized bready and pale malts, a subtle heritage-borne plastic essence, and very weak earthy, musty hops. 58 IBUs for the fail!

The carbonation is supportive enough, I suppose, though perhaps a bit edgy and metallic at the same rate, the body a bit too far on the light side of medium weight for any known iteration of the style, and way too tacky and thin to be considered particularly smooth. It finishes off-dry, and blithely spiteful (no, that's not just me), the plain-ass grainy malt sort of shedding any cocoa, cherry, or hops character that might (and that's a mighty big 'might') have been.

A weakly engaging, at best, example of contract 'craft' brewing, in all its unpleasant unravelings. There seems to be hints of what could and should be, but the rug has been duly pulled out from under this offering, a common theme for this whole bullshit Wisconsin family affair.