Sternwheeler Scotch Ale
Barkerville Brewing Co.

fuck yea home town approved

650ml bottle - a proclaimed Scottish Export style ale, with more old-timey nomenclature.

This beer pours a clear, dark orange-brick brown colour, with three fingers of puffy, rocky, and bubbly tan head, which leaves some emerging from the deep sea creature lace around the glass as it quickly subsides.

It smells of lightly roasted, bready and doughy caramel malt, muddled dark orchard fruit (plums and raisins, maybe), bittersweet cocoa powder, a further bit of peaty smokiness, some mild earthy yeast, and very plain leafy, weedy, and dead floral noble hop bitters. The taste is gritty and grainy caramel malt, a touch of biscuity toffee, still hard to parse black stone fruit (bruised apples, too), ephemeral earthy peat, a fading musty yeastiness, and more weedy, herbal and gently perfumed floral verdant hoppiness.

The carbonation is fairly average in its quotidian frothiness, the body a decent medium weight, and generally smooth, with perhaps a touch of earthy ashiness playing the minor foil here. It finishes off-dry, the malt certainly holding down the fort, but the hoppy bitterness comes along for the ride, ensuring a lack of sugary palate fatigue.

Overall, this is an agreeable enough version of the style, nice and malty, but balanced for the most part by smoke and hop alike. Easy to drink, especially for the essentially hidden, north of 15-proof firewater quotient. Worth checking out, even if the big day for Scottish tipples passed by a few weeks or so ago.

 

 

 

More authentic than most domestic attempts, but a bit thin and fruity... I'd like some more malt flavour to come through.