Porter For Another Reason
Swiftwater Brewing Company

This brew was served on tap at Swift Water Brewing Company’s taproom in Rochester, New York. Poured into a house Weizen glass, it showed a ruddy chocolate coloring. It held a brief finger tall head of uniform, medium brown bubbles. This dissipated on the quicker side, leaving wet dots of lacing adorning the sides of the glass. A dense haze was noted due to the lighter coloring for the style, but no sediment was seen. Carbonation appeared to be mild. The aroma had a very raw feel to it, with steel cut oats, brown sugar, red cherry syrups, cleanly roasted chocolate, coffee, and lighter brown maltiness, cardboard, light metallic adjuncts, distant washed floral hoppiness, dark chocolate syrup, powdery bready yeastiness, cold polenta, and white and wheat flour. The taste to follow gave notes of sweetly buttered and roasted chocolate and coffee grain, coca cola sugars, tannic breakfast tea, watered down black coffee, burnt cane sugar packets (paper and all), chalky white waxiness, salt water taffy, candy corn, molded denim, chocolate ganache, aluminum, walnut oiliness, and burnt pumpernickel breadiness. The body was medium, and the carbonation was medium. Each sip gave nice slurp and smack off the glass, and appropriately matched creaminess and frothiness to the lip. The mouth was left chalked and slightly tannic in its dryness, without real coating or satiation otherwise. The abv was well within normal limits, and the beer sipped away easily.

Overall, this is the first darker spectrum beer we’ve have from Swift Water, and it was a nice treat. Examining it stylistically, this is a light beer for a porter. The grain profile is reasonably roasted, but there is much more of it that just comes across as “raw”, as described above. This is not a detriment to the beer’s profile, or an outright complaint of ours, but something worth noting. It makes the beer a bit more easy-going, and seemingly more like a brown ale. This is noticeable in both the aroma and the flavoring. Regardless, it was easy drinking, and flowed across the lips pleasantly. We would certainly order this again, but would be curious to see if the grain profile could be bulked up, or darkened down, to see if it couldn’t give us more of a robust, charging thrust to the thing.