Brown Ale
Boiling Oar Brewing Company

1L howler from the Sherbrooke Liquor store - thanks to Susan for having the good graces of legible handwriting on the attached tag - just sayin'.

This beer pours a clear, dark red brick amber colour, with two chubby fingers of puffy, rather loosely foamy, and certainly bubbly beige head, which leaves some stellar spooky forest lace around the glass as it evenly subsides.

It smells of toasted wheat, gritty and grainy pale malt, ethereal suggestions of coffee and cocoa powder, a minor sense of sour milkiness, some generic bar-top nuts, and very tame earthy, leafy, and floral noble hop bitters. The taste is bready and crackery caramel malt, a lesser gritty pale graininess, some kind of inauspicious yeastiness, subtle black peppercorn, a bland earthy nuttiness, some free-range smokiness, hints of chocolate better spent elsewhere, and more wan leafy and herbal hoppiness.

The carbonation is actually fairly supportive in its perfunctory frothiness, the body a so-so medium weight, and smooth by the same pithy metric. It finishes off-dry, but barely, as that stillborn ashy essence somehow seems to have a sort of weird staying power.

Overall, this is an agreeable enough brown ale, with neither an American nor an old-school temperament, which, of course, makes it all the more Canadian. So, not a bad brew, the nuttiness and cocoa essences doing well to recommend themselves - check it out, if you get the chance.