Rizzla
Hearthstone Brewery

 

355ml can - a rice lager, made with well, rice, and pilsner malt, and an unspecified enzyme during fermentation to reduce the gluten to less than ten parts per million.

This beer pours a hazy, pale golden yellow colour, with four fingers of puffy, billowy, and shiny bone-white head, which leaves some decent splattered and scattered lace around the glass as it very lazily subsides.

It smells of semi-sweet, grainy and crackery pale malt, rice cakes, some indistinct domestic citrus rind, simple syrup, and some plain earthy, leafy, and floral green hop bitters. The taste is grainy and doughy pale malt, cold cooked rice, a candied fruitiness, and more tame musty, leafy, and sort of spicy hoppiness.

The carbonation is fairly understated in its innocuous-seeming frothiness, the body an adequate middleweight, and generally smooth, nothing really getting in the way of the ideal here. It finishes off-dry, the blended malt character and muddled fruitiness carrying the lingering day.

Overall - this is a bit of a weird bird, in that it tastes good, but comes off a tad sweet, like it could use a smidge more hop bitterness. Avoiding sorghum in their attempt to render it gluten-friendly is an admirable choice, as you don't get any of the associated unpleasant vegetal astringency. Well done.