Boston Common
Two Sergeants Brewing

Poured from a 473 ml can. Unfortunately all four cans in the pack suffered from infection problems and smelled and tasted like band-aids. Serious quality control issues making this beer undrinkable. Given this was a collaboration between Two Sergeants and Outcast, hard to know where the fault lies, but that unfortunately makes me wary of both breweries.

 

I was excited to try this, so when big cans arrived in my neck of the woods, it was a no brained to grab a 4 pack. This beer is clear, gold, and topped with a nice white head. Overall, the fruit and bitterness is muddled, and this beer doesn’t quite seem to know how hat it wants to be. A pleasant enough beer, but it’s somewhat underwhelming.

1L howler from Sherbrooke Liquor store (a collaboration with Outcast Brewing), with little info abounding about who actually owns this brand. I'm going with the actual brewing concern here, though the reference to the short-lived American mid-1990s sitcom may be a separate, defining issue.

This beer pours a hazy, pale golden yellow colour, with one skinny-ass finger of puffy, weakly foamy, and bubbly dirty white head, which leaves some quickly defrosting ice bridge lace around the glass as it quickly bleeds out of sight.

It smells of bready and crackery pale malt, some peppy orange, lemon, and white grapefruit citrus rind, subtle hard water flinty notes, and more leafy, weedy, and musky floral green hop bitters. The taste is gritty and grainy cereal malt, plain Pez candies, muddled domestic citrus peel, a further bit of equally hard to parse tropical fruitiness, wet stone paths afters a good rain, and further earthy, musty, and floral verdant hoppiness.

The carbonation is average in its palate-coddling frothiness, the body a so-so medium weight, and generally smooth, with nothing really getting in the way of the ideal here. It finishes off-dry, the malt, minerality, and muddled citrus essences carrying us out of the lingering experience.

Overall - this is purported to be one of those new-fangled 'NEIPAs', but, for one, at the given ABV, it already fails a basic metric. Yeah, the flavours are certainly there, but there's enough confusion circling this offering that makes me glad that my discount on these two takeaway pints was so gratuitous - my brain's beer receptors were expecting some 'California Common' bullshit, and got tired of looking for it. My bad, I guess.