Hoptic Blast
Kootenai River Brewing Company & Restaurant

16oz pint at the brewery on another hot day in Northern Idaho.

This beer appears a hazy, yet bright medium apricot amber hue, with one finger of puffy, broadly foamy, and faintly creamy off-white head, which leaves some random distant shoreline lace around the glass as it evenly subsides.

It smells of grainy, somewhat crackery pale malt, a twinge of biscuity caramel, mild generic citrus and leafy pine hop bitters, a prominent chalky flintiness, and further herbal, earthy, and floral hops. The taste is bready, lightly doughy caramel malt, a hard to pin down pine resin and citrusy bitterness, still heady chalky notes, and a plain earthy, leafy and faintly perfumed hoppiness.

The carbonation is adequate for the job at hand, what with its supportive frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and more or less smooth, these hops apparently lackluster at multiple things. It finishes trending dry, the caramel ceding the rest of its normally unassailable throne to that lingering chalky essence.

The only blast that I experienced with this offering is the sense of loss of place, in that I thought I'd suddenly found myself in Vermont, or the like, instead of out west, and within a lazy afternoon drive to the Canadian border. Yeah, lots of mineral and chalk, maybe enough to distract from the hops' general deficiency here.