Range Road Cream Ale
Coulee Brew Co.

Appearance is bubbly and lightly hazy, pale yellow with brighter lemon colored highlights to it, pours with a finger and a half of white foamy looking head that doesn't have a great retention to it but keeps a thin skim of across the surface and leaves a light webby patchwork of lacing on the glass.

Aroma is fairly mild with a nice hint of malt sweetness and a faint touch of oranges.

Malt forward, medium bodied, clean and moderately sweet with a grainy, cereal flavor to it with maybe a touch of oats, giving a smoother mouth-feel then most, almost be creamy if not for the slightly higher then average carbonation to it, and maybe a ghostly trace of sodium on the back-end.

Nice amount of citrus forward, orange and a bit of pith with almost a dehydrated orange wheel quality to it, not really juicy tasting, sweeter and a bit more subtle in its flavor.

Light bitterness to the hop finish does a good job to balance the front end, still it ends up leaning more towards the sweeter side, hop flavor is floral and lightly pithy orange, clean and doesn't linger, though there is a slightly odd lingering off-dry/ creamy texture that reminds me of Guinness a bit, but with a very different flavor to it as well as a lightly sweet orange hint on the aftertaste.

One of the better of the cream ales style beers I've tried, not really a style I favor, but this one is pretty good.

 

 

 

355ml can poured into tulip 1/5/17

A hazy pale yellow saturated by tiny bubbles, dense thumbs width of of foam has great retention and leaves partial rings deep down the glass

s doughy, honey, apple sauce, a hint of soft caramel

T more of the same, more cereals then the nose

M medium bodied but soft and creamy, a little slick inside, grainy finish

O not a whole lot going on so that would put it on par for the style really

It's pretty basic but it could please the masses, I can't remember the last memorable cream ale I've had.....go figure...

355ml can - having grown up in southern Alberta, I'm all too familiar with range roads, if not cream ales, of a kind.

This beer pours a mostly clear, pale golden yellow colour, with four fleshy fingers of puffy, somewhat rocky, and bubbly off-white head, which leaves some stellar blotchy lace around the glass as it lazily recedes.

It smells of semi-sweet, bready and doughy pale malt, a bit of earthy yeastiness, some weak wheat cracker notes, subtle pome and stone fruit notes, and very plain leafy, weedy, and floral green hop bitters. The taste is grainy and bready pale malt, still understated wheaten cereal, some muddled citrus and apple/pear fruitiness, fading phenolic yeast, and more tame leafy, earthy, and musky floral verdant hoppiness.

The carbonation is quite mild in its workaday frothiness, the body a decent medium weight, and mostly smooth, but for a typical clamminess taking a few points off of the desirable score here. It finishes off-dry, the mixed graininess keeping tabs on everything and nothing else.

Overall, this is a more or less plebeian version of the style, one which has to try really, really hard to rise above the scrubs, as it were. Nothing too complex or even complicated, which makes my palate's stare trail off into the metaphorical distance.