Porter
Big Rock Brewery

Don't get me wrong this isn't a bad beer, but it's a very boring beer. Many porters are known for their bold flavours, but the Big Rock porter simply lacks intensity. There's no excitement in the flavour, the beer is just unfortunately bland. It drinks smoother than most porters, but that smoothness comes at the cost of flavour.

330ml bottle, part of the current Barn Burner autumn-themed mixed pack from the Big Rock Brewery. Ostensibly different from the barrel-aged porter iterations they've put out in the past few years.

This beer pours a clear, dark orange-brick brown colour, with three fingers of puffy, rocky, and somewhat creamy beige head, which leaves some decent sudsy webbed lace around glass as it lazily subsides.

It smells of lightly roasted and bready caramel malt, some muddled dark orchard fruitiness, hints of black licorice, coffee-flecked medium chocolate, and some weirdly fruity and tropical hoppiness. The taste is gritty and grainy caramel malt, a touch of free-range ashiness, bittersweet cocoa, a twinge of cafe-au-lait, still kind of hard to pin down bruised fruit, ephemeral anise notes, and more rather tame fruity and mildly verdant hop bitters.

The carbonation is adequate for the supportive job at hand via its workaday frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and mostly smooth, with a bit of ashy character maybe playing the spoilsport here. It finishes off-dry, just, as the roastiness starts to do in the malt, and the fruitiness of the hops gains some bittering momentum.

Overall, Big Rock's Porter turns out to be a fairly well-made new-world version of the style, if one steeped in old-world traditions. I'm not getting the 'hop bite' mentioned in the label blurb, but it does dry out at the end, which make this a nicely drinkable quaff.