Dam Dark
Blue Mountain Brewing Co.

At The Lumberjack in nearby Windsor for my lady Pamela's birthday; on tap and chilled, 20oz. in a pint glass. My second beer from the Thornbury, Ontario brewery, and for 2025...

 

 

473 ml can served cold into a chalice. LCBO purchase for around $3.25 CDN.

Appearance- Very dark brown color with good clarity (of what you can see). A finger of light tan head is poured and fizzles away in a couple of minutes. Sparse lacing left behind.

Smell - Plenty of grain, slightly nutty and roasted elements. Subtle bit of nutty chocolate and baker's brown bread mixed in. Pretty good combo of aromas, although terribly intense.

Taste - Quite sweet with caramel leading the way, a little too sweet and some sharpness from alcohol in here. Caramel yes but lacking the breadiness and chocolate that was apparent in the nose. Not bad but just a bit off.

Mouthfeel - Carbonation is medium light some spicy sharpness from the booze to close. Medium bodied otherwise.

Overall - Not a bad brew but a little refinement is in order there's a harsh boozy sharpness here that shouldn't be with a sub 5% dark lager. The aroma is pretty solid with a nice tidy bouquet of diverse aromas, but everything else falls just a bit short. Would retry as maybe this batch is just a bit off.

 

 

 

Can - pours a clear cola color with a 2 finger mocha cap....aroma is toasty-coffee tones with some dark fruit undertones....flavor is roasty-malty with enough noble hop balance to keep the sweetness at bay....clean dry roasty finish ---- nice dunkel but has changed sinificantly since King ran this recipe as an unfiltered zwickel style dunkel.....still a decent dark lager

Acidic taste, something of the rich dunkle character buried somewhere. Not authentic or interesting based on tastings of Bavarian originals of the style. Will not revisit.

Had this from a standard 473 ml Canadian pint can. It is a fairly standard Dunkel, though even more on the mild side than most of the style. It leans towards tasting like a lighter colored lager than a more complex beer featuring roasted malt.

my first beer from thornbury. its a style i found quite common in ontario last week, the german inspired "dark" lager, meaning some red shade between copper and mahogany. this one pours just a little closer to brown, into a pilsener glass from the tap, and with its short tan head fading down before i can even fully appreciate it, there and gone. its got a nice grain depth to it, plenty of german type malt, sweet toffee and caramelized sugar, molasses, light cocoa, and a european breadiness from both the grains and the yeast used, a more flavorful lager strain in this context than i saw in a lot of other euro lagers there. there are notes of red berries, rum raisins, black tea, and even vanilla when i think about nuance, but the problem for me is just how overly sugary this is. i can only drink one glass. if this were fermented down to even palatable on the sugar, it would likely come in somewhere around 8% abv! it tastes half done to me, which i really never like, so even while i enjoy the flavors created by the mash and dont hate the beer overall, it seems incomplete and sort of amateur as a result of all the residual sugar. the relative lack of carbonation doesnt do it any favors for drinkability either. overall a more flavorful take on the style than many of its peers i had during my trip, but still not a beer i really want to spend much time with...

 

 

 

 

 

Tallboy can with no apparent packaging date; served well-chilled. This is just the old King Dark (Munich Dunkel) Lager, given a new marketing angle.

Pours a dark, translucent ruby-brown colour, with two fingers of creamy, light beige-coloured foam that rapidly dissipates over the next two minutes or so. Some scattered patches of lace are deposited, and a modest collar rims the surface. Caramel and butterscotch on the nose, along with notes of toasted nuts, candy corn, dark bread and biscuity malt. Not bad, but a little too saccharine for my preferences.

A decent dark lager, and quite approachable. More caramel and molasses sweetness comes through at first, followed by plenty of bready malts. Lightly toasted biscuit and hazelnut, with hints of raisin, date and chocolate. Leafy, earthy finish with some lingering dark fruit sweetness into the aftertaste. Light in body, with assertive carbonation that prickles the palate and supplies the sort of crisp mouthfeel that you'd expect from a German-style lager. Not very memorable, but exceedingly easy to knock back.

Final Grade: 3.49, a B-. I wasn't a big fan of King Dark, so it follows that I'm not particularly enamoured with Dark Horse Lager, either. To be fair, I am not a Munich Dunkel fan (nor do I love ambers in general), so my opinion can probably be taken with a grain of salt: this is acceptable, but not anything special. If you enjoy dark/amber lagers then this is probably worth a look - it's a tried-and-true session beer - but if you don't fall into that category, then you wouldn't really be missing much by skipping this.