Lazy Mutt Alberta Brown Ale
Minhas Craft Brewery

 

Tooooo Foamy. What is up with this beer? Bought it in the 650 ml bottle and it's too foamy to drink. They need to fix this problem

 

 

650ml bottle. Another barely distinguishable offering from the newish Calgary branch of the too-long running Wisconsin originators of this rather unheralded brewing concern.

This beer, um, 'pours', a super foamy, frothy and mostly liquid-free experience - light, ebullient, and outright frustrating in its obfuscating rocky, thinly foamy off-white head, which continues to push out of the lip of the bottle, even while I wait for the firsties to duly (i.e. make room in the glass) settle. I'm eventually presented with a rather dark ruddy amber hue of veritable beer, with the laziest puffy head that I've ever encountered, which leaves some thick, sudsy swaths of low-lying cloudy lace around the glass as it begrudgingly settles.

It smells of nutty, somewhat bready caramel malt, a touch of gritty minerals, some dry breadiness, edgy yeast, and earthy, weedy hops. The taste is more of the same - crackery pale and caramel malt, oily dark nuts, mildly astringent yeast, a hint of stale black fruit, a subtle hard water flintiness, and decent earthy, leafy, and musty hops.

The bubbles, well the bubbles be the problem here, doncha already know? Even after the agonizing pour finally settles, there's still an overbearingly sharp, frothy nature to it all, which oh-slow-slowly wafts away, only to be readily replaced, the body an airy medium-light weight, and not smooth at all - one's brain cannot conceive of the concept by this point. It finishes off-dry, the nutty malt doing well enough to persist, but c'mon, my throat just can't take anymore. I'd say that it was infected, but no, it actually tastes all right.

Jebus Fucking Christ, Minhas, can't you get anything right? From what I can grok through the furor, this is the fizziest, frothiest, and most hiccup-inducing non-bottle-conditioned brew that I have ever had the displeasure of coming across. Which is a patent shame, because I detect a more or less agreeable nutty brown ale underneath it all, but I'm hardly able to focus on that particular aspect right now.