Madawaska Maple Ale
Mill Street Brew Pub

 

 

 

Pours a medium copper body with just a slight head the quickly decays to a thin film. The aroma brings up floral yeast, caramel, bread, some maple, and a slight earthiness. The taste is bold with a roasted malt flavour primarily, evolving across the tongue into toffee and maple notes, yet not accompanied by the sweetness one expects when thinking of these flavours. Instead, it finishes with a crisp, bitter pop, decaying into more flavours of toast with molasses. Very nice, I'd drink it again.

 

 

Quite malty and sweet with an unexpectedly dry finish. Thin-bodied. Not overly flavourful. Just a hint of maple. Unusual aroma. Just too weak-kneed across the board. Unmemorable. Not something I'd look forward to doing again.

341 ml bottle served cold into a pint glass. Purchased as part of a six pack a month or so back.

Appearance - clear dark ruby color with copper hues. Some white had that recedes into a thin film of foam.

Smell - sweet cramel notes with some trace of maple. Lots of grain. Surprisingly robust aroma.

Taste - nice Irish ale with lots of grain, caramel notes and just enough maple early and mid sip to make you take notice. Mild bitterness throughout.

Mouthfeel - smooth and light body, good carbonation and drying finish. A fine red ale.

Overall - whil Madawaska Maple isn't a blow you away type ale with lots of wow factor, it is a fine red ale with enough of the quintessential Canadian ingredient, maple syrup to make you take notice. Worse options can abound in mixed six packs, and worth arty if you get the chance.

355 mL bottle from their Spring 2016 sampler pack; dated Jan 21 2016. Served slightly chilled.

Pours a translucent orange-amber hue, supporting a full inch of fluffy, soapy, bone white-coloured head. Good retention; it also leaves behind a gorgeous layer of sponge-print lacing as it slowly seeps down. A modest-sized cap and foamy collar survive afterwards. Looks great to me, but there's not much to say for the nose - some doughy, grainy malt sweetness is noticeable, maybe some brown sugar, but not a whole lot of maple.

Serviceable, but not too interesting. It tastes of more grainy malt and caramelized sugar, with some bready, biscuity notes and very mild hints of maple. Leafy, grassy hops contribute some much-needed depth in the latter half, with a woody, earthy bitter-sweet character fading gradually into the aftertaste. Light-bodied, with aggressive carbonation levels and a crisp, prickly mouthfeel; a little more of a bite than I'd prefer.

Final Grade: 3.6, a B grade. A lot of maple beers seem to go overboard with the featured ingredient, but Mill Street's Madawaska Maple is pretty much the exact opposite. The maple flavour is very muted, and while the base beer itself is not exactly bad, it's also not interesting enough to make this any more than an average Irish red. I think I preferred their old Spring Thaw Maple over this one, but not to a massive degree - both are passable, relatively forgettable maple beers that I could leave or take.

Bottle from the spring sampler from the lcbo.

It's nice to have a maple beer where the maple flavor is not the main point in the beer.

 

355ml bottle, another cog in the current Mill Street Spring mixed pack. Made with traditionally sourced maple syrup from the titular valley, so sez the back label marketing spiel.

This beer pours a clear, medium copper amber colour, with three fat-ass fingers of puffy, finely foamy, and mildly bubbly beige head, which leaves some decent broken cobweb lace around the glass as it slowly but surely subsides.

It smells of gritty bready and doughy caramel malt, subtly sweet maple candies, a hint of dark orchard stone fruit, tame earthy yeast notes, and a generic weedy, leafy, and gently floral hop bitterness. The taste is bready and somewhat biscuity caramel malt, some further maple-tinged toffee sweetness, a dry sort of black fruit essence, a slight whiff of smoking wood, and more laid-back earthy, leafy, and floral noble hoppiness.

The carbonation is quite active in its testy and sometimes challenging frothiness, the body a solid middleweight, and mostly smooth, with nothing really getting in the way of a plain airy creaminess to boot. It finishes well off-dry, but moderated to a certain extent by the inherent graininess of the malt.

Overall, a well-made, if kind of simple rendering of the style, with the adjunct maple character more or less dialing it in. Easy to drink, and at least rather reminiscent of defrosting pine trees around this time of the year.