Molson Dry 8.5
Molson Coors Canada

 

 

1.18L, um, jug (it's just much cooler to say 'forty', but the label sez what the label sez). Got to try this through the good will of someone maybe a tad uneducated in the way of the beer, but hey, it takes all kinds, right? Seems to me like this particular sort of offering is a decidedly Quebecois thing, as I recall seeing an inordinate amount of stuff like this when I was there a few years ago.

This beer pours a crystal clear, medium golden yellow colour, with one finger of bubbly, fizzy off-white head, which leaves a bit of far-strewn islet lace around the glass as it quickly wafts away.

It smells of a barely (hah - it looks like 'barley'!) sweet corn and rice graininess, a mild denuded apple fruitiness, some flitting hard water flintiness, faint earthy hops, and a somewhat bristling 'dry' alcohol edge. The taste is gritty, grainy corn/rice syrup, a surprising, yet still stale corn pone breadiness, weak, stripped-down drupe fruit, some understated stony mineral notes, and a mild alcohol warmth, sans any particular flavour association.

The bubbles are pretty well sublimated, and generally not a nuisance (or an asset), the body medium light in that sort of tremulous adjunct-bequeathed way, and very plainly smooth, the tacky alcohol and perhaps even some put-upon hops contributing as such. It finishes well, dry, how could it be any other way?

It is what it proclaims to be - a jacked up (booze-wise, only, come on now!) version of their niche market Molson Dry 'line'. Which is so say, they at least keep the sky-high, sickly sweetness endemic to this style well in check. So much so, that after a mere single serving of it, I'm kind of hoping for at least a small breakthrough of said sugar. Or maybe I should just go get a freakin' doughnut, eh?