Rio Pale Ale
NOVO Brazil Brewing Co.

REVZEB from Illinois

3.49/5  rDev +6.1%
look: 3.75 | smell: 3.5 | taste: 3.5 | feel: 3.25 | overall: 3.5

Had on tap. The pour was encouraging, with an orange haze and plenty of white foam. Smell is earthy and grassy hop work with pale malts supporting, needs a punch! The taste is similar, with some citrus and herbal flavors to help a little. Body is pretty thin and fizzy. Ok

Sep 20, 2018

biboergosum from Canada (AB)

3.76/5  rDev +14.3%
look: 4 | smell: 3.5 | taste: 3.75 | feel: 3.75 | overall: 4

16oz can (@ 5.5% ABV), another offering from this SoCal brewery that somehow made it way the hell up here before anywhere else in its native Cali.

This beer pours a slightly hazy, medium copper amber colour, with a fistful of puffy, rocky, and chunky off-white head, which leaves some stellar splattered and sudsy lace around the glass as it lazily subsides.

It smells of gritty and grainy pale malt, some strong herbal and floral green hop bitters, faint pome fruity notes, and a weird earthy yeastiness. The taste is bready and doughy pale malt, some biscuity white crackers, a hard water flintiness, some muddled orange and generic grapefruit citrus pith, further dried stone fruit notes, and some plain leafy, herbal, and dead grassy hoppiness.

The carbonation is adequate in its quotidian frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and generally smooth, with perhaps a suggestion of citrus pithiness taking us out of the realm of the ideal. It finishes trending dry, as the sweetness falls out of the malt, and the various hops assume a wan lingering stranglehold.

Overall, this comes across as a simple, well-made, but hardly outstanding version of the style, which, when looked at another way, makes it near perfect. No big hop-blast that is more evocative of IPAs, and a pale malt that doesn't tread on amber territory. Ergo, this is good for what it is, and not for what it's not. Or something.

Dec 13, 2016