Robot Ninja Sorachi Lager
Happy Place Brewing Co.

 

Format: a solid black 330mL bottle with a funky anime-esque label. Looks good. Also checked their website robotninjalager.com - very flashy hype and marketing. A bit worrying - style over substance? We'll see.

Appearance: mid yellow in colour with a small white head that breaks away to a thin film. Okay.

Aroma: some clean rice adjuncts and grain, with some earth characteristics. Very, very light aroma. A bit boring.

Taste: again very weak here with the flavours from the nose. A reasonable flavour profile, but very weak.

Aftertaste: drops away very quickly, with a touch of more earth.

Mouth feel: quite light in body with a lighter to medium carbonation. Perhaps a touch more carbonation would make this come to life a bit more.

Overall: another case of great marketing for an average beer. It isn't offensive by any means, just very light in flavour and a bit dull. I get the feeling that the AU$65+ a case price is more to pay for their advertising rather than for the beer.

Robot Ninja sounds like a name from some marketing boffin that was too lazy to put any effort into coming up with anything else - Boss: We need a name, something catchy, and Japanese as the beer is done a Japanese style. Marketing boffin: (lazily) Robot... Ninja? Boss: Yes! That's it! Anyway here's hoping they put more effort into the beer than they did into the name.

Poured from a 330ml bottle into a pokal.

A: A white half centimetre head straddles a clear sunglow body.

S: Smells quite dirty actually, as in dug up dirt, must be the Sorachi hops (which I've had before in Feral's Golden Ace) however I don't remember them adding a 'dirt' aroma previously. Aside from this notes of lemon and not much else, these rice lagers don't lend themselves to having much aroma and when they do it is generally a dry rice wine odour, not unlike Sake.

T: The flavours are extraordinarily restrained, especially considering it has Sorachi written on the bottle. It's a lightly flavoured lager - dryness from the rice gives it a finish and the Sorachi adds a bit of a lemony/butter note, but there is little else that stands out.

M: Light bodied with a flat carbonation.

D: About as exciting as a match of tennis-chess, a game I just invented (wait that actually sounds exciting) - insert your least favourite sport to watch (golf is that sport for me) add a case of this beer and you will literally die of boredom. I almost did during this review - needed to resuscitate myself by cracking open a bottle of Hook Norton's fine Twelve Days, glad I had something tasty in the fridge to save me.

Food match: Plain rice crackers, flavouring would only serve to overpower this beer.

330ml brown bottle purchased from Slowbeer in Melbourne by Sam and given to me for Christmas.

Pours a dirty yellow colour, quite hazed, with a very light body. Head crackles with large wispy bubbles, but burns out quickly, leaving only a very fine edging to the glass. Some fine carbonation. Overall, it looks a bit flat and a bit unappealing.

Nose is dusty and slightly woody with Sorachi hops. Underneath is a rather dank malt character, probably some of the rice coming through in a sticky flat mess. Aroma is certainly muted overall, but the characters that are there are not what I expected anyway.

Taste is similar, although here the Sorachi provides a buttery sweetness which rounds out a lot of the weird edges at least. Rice on the finish leaves it quite dry, but with a sticky sweetness as well. It needs something a bit sharper to make it crisp: as it is, it feels a little cloying and difficult to drink.

Overall, I'm not a fan. I've quite enjoyed some craft rice lagers recently; 2 Brothers Kung Foo is a case in point. But this relies on buttery Sorachi to do anything for it, and it just sort of melts into the overall messiness. Not for me.