Ben Franklin Brown
13 Virtues Brewing

Finally, a beer that’s not served too cold. This is an “American Style Brown Ale”. And sure enough, it is brown. Or mostly brown. It’s sort of a shoe polish brown with a hint of mahogany. But brown enough. It’s also really bad. It’s brown and it’s bad.

Ben Franklin holds a slight head. It smells like rotten meat cruelly preserved with formaldehyde and furniture polish. It tastes like toothpaste on a turd.

Seriously. It’s extremely rare to be served a beer this bad at a brewpub. When the waitress asked how I liked it I simply lied. Such a nice kid. I couldn’t bear to tell her she had served me a pint of something best used as a teething remedy or engine degreaser. This beer hurts.
The mouthfeel is like cellulose – like the inedible fibrous strands of a celery stalk. Or perhaps the mouthfeel is like a gravel driveway or a shark skin or like rubbing your hands on Bruce Willis’s legs or perhaps tonguing a New York subway car or like baked seaweed on a rock or snorting Rice Krispies or……