Colt 45 Pile Driver
Pabst Brewing Company

24 ounce can into tulip glass, canned on 7/11/2017. Pours very hazy golden/orange juice color with no head retention or lacing. A fair amount of steaming carbonation and clinging bubbles on the glass. Good appearance. Aromas of tangerine, orange juice/pulp, lemon, lime, citrus peel/zest, cracker, corn, white bread dough, and slight herbal/grassy earthiness. Bit of fruity corn aromas, but not overwhelming. Nice and pleasant aromas with good balance of citrus juice/zest and moderate pale malt/corn notes; with solid strength. Taste of big tangerine, orange juice/pulp, lemon, lime, citrus peel/zest, cracker, corn, white bread dough, and slight herbal/grassy earthiness. Light citrus tang/tartness; and slight herbal, grassy, zesty bitterness on the finish. Lingering notes of tangerine, orange juice/pulp, lemon, lime, citrus peel/zest, cracker, corn, white bread dough, and slight herbal/grassy earthiness on the finish for a good bit. Great robustness and balance of citrus juice/zest and moderate pale malt/corn flavors; with a nice malt/juice/tartness balance, and no cloying flavors after the finish. Light-moderate increasing dryness from tart/tangy fruit, spicy alcohol, and carbonation after the finish. Medium-plus carbonation and medium body; with a very smooth, fairly crisp, juicy/pulpy, bready/grainy, and acidic/tangy balanced mouthfeel that is great. Slight increasing warmth of 5.9% after the finish. Overall this is a very nice fruit flavored malt liquor. All around nice robustness and balance of citrus juice/zest and moderate pale malt/corn flavors; dangerously smooth and fairy crisp/refreshing to drink, with the mellowly acidic/tangy/drying finish. Very flavorful and not watery. Tastes just like a beer mimosa as expected. Tons of citrus juice vibrancy, with nice malt liquor presence/balance in the background. A very enjoyable offering, and well made style example. Held up really well for the age of the can.

 

 

 

I was on a recent foray out to Harrisburg when I decided to pop in at Shady McGrady's to see what they had on draft (mainly), but I also spied a couple/few things in the cooler that I decided to bring home with me in furtherance of The CANQuest (tm). This 24-fl. oz. gem was one of them.

From the CAN: "Orange flavored Malt Liquor"; "Flip It Peel It"; "Malt Beverage with Natural Flavors colored with Fruit and Vegetable Juice."

I was growing anxious to see what this was going to be about, but the Crack! could only be followed by a gentle Glug due to the amount of liquid involved. I poured & poured & then I performed an in-glass swirl & I could not raise any head at all. Color was a cloudy Orangish-Yellow-Gold (SRM = 4 -5) and it looked like I had just mixed up a batch of Tang & poured it into my glass! I think that this may be an amusing drink, if nothing else. Those "natural flavors" smelled like powdered concentrate or frozen from concentrate and while it smelled orange-y, it did not smell entirely natural. Mouthfeel was thin & watery. The taste was like cheap frozen orange juice - both sweet and tangy, but not very pleasant. I pulled a bottle of water out of the reefer to help wash this down. The alcohol was completely masked by the orange/fruit juice, making it an even more deadly CANbination. It was not as sweet as CJ Crunk Juice Orange, but it was one tough drink to get down. Finish was in that grey area between semi-sweet & semi-dry, but is that really the way to quantify something that tastes like reconstituted orange juice? Phew.

Poured from a 24 oz. can. Looks just like I poured a glass of orange juice, no head whatsoever. Smell has some oranges, nothing else. Taste is like drinking a glass of Tang, only much sweeter, some tartness. Feels medium/light bodied in the mouth and overall, drinkable and unique, but I won't be needing another.

Pours orange from the 24 ounce can. Orange citrus and some alcohol in the smell. Orange flavour, mostly sweet but with a slight tartness. Alcohol is noticeable just because how much this reminds me of juice and not a malt liquor flavoured with oranges; iow, it's not boozy. This defies my definition of a malt liquor but to me, it's drinkable. Not even all that bad. How's that for a recommendation!

I drink a lot of Colt 45, in 40 oz and 18 oz bottles and 24 oz and 12 oz cans. I like it. (I also especially like Colt 45 Double Malt, but I can't get it in my immediate area.) It's a solid lager, better than its reputation.

This, in contrast, is terrible. Is it a flavored malt liquor? Is it a "malt beverage"? It doesn't know. The description on the 24 oz can claims both and more. The answer is that it tastes nothing like a malt liquor and just like another sickly sweet alcopop that frat daddies feed to doe-eyed high school sweeties and sad, fat, wanna-be-popular freshmen girls. People in those demographics should especially avoid it, but so should everyone else too.

Know your malts. This isn't one.

CAN: Orange and white label...looks like a retro design. 24 fl oz/710ml format. Standard pull-tab. Acquired at a crappy 24 hour bodega in Brooklyn - the kind of place where immigrants loiter on the sidewalk outside sitting on upside down milk crates playing cards and engaging in illicit gambling.

"Orange flavored malt liquor." "Malt beverage with natural flavors colored with fruit and vegetable juice." 5.9% ABV.

Served cold into a nonic pint.

HEAD: Fizzles out instantly.

BODY: Looks like juice. Hazy yellow-orange, and oddly neon bright...looks like Sunny Delight.

AROMA: Sunny Delight is again an apt comparison...cloyingly sweet orange juice-flavored artificial garbage. Calls to mind a shot of vodka mixed with one of those cans of frozen orange juice concentrate. Suggests a syrupy and artificial brew, and I struggle to put out of my mind the fact that this somehow contains vegetable juice in spite of being orange flavored. Potent and off-putting, promising cloying and borderline medicinal foulness of the lowest order. Aromatic intensity is - unfortunately - quite high.

TASTE & TEXTURE: Acidic, thick, syrupy, and unrefreshing, yet smooth and wet.

True to its foul aroma, it tastes like Sunny Delight with a shot of fusel grain alcohol dropped in as well as some extra cane sugar for bad measure. Imagine a can of orange juice concentrate accidentally left in the back freezer of a 7-11 in rural Nevada for 8 years was discovered and then promptly mixed with bathtub hooch and you've got a decent approximation of how repugnant this liquid is.

I guess a benefit of the cloying sweetness is it covers up any corn adjunct that's no doubt lurking beneath the artificial orange juice flavour along with the cheapest of bottom shelf 6-row barley.

OVERALL: Malt liquors are a guilty pleasure of mine ordinarily, but this shit's pushing it. On a venn diagram with Circle A being "everything wrong with bad fruit beers" and Circle B being "everything wrong with bad malt liquors," this is the entirety of the middle overlap. If you're a high school student whose conception of a good alcoholic beverage is a mixture of 90% triple sec and 10% everclear lifted from your parents' liquor cabinet, this will be right up your alley. For the rest of us, this is best left alone on shelves where it belongs to await shoplifting by homeless vagrants.

After enduring half a nonic of this abomination, I ended up pouring what was left (i.e. 85% of the can) into a bottle of discount tequila I got for free since it wasn't consumed at the wrap party for a "Real Housewives of..." reality TV shoot. It's safe to say this is downright undrinkable.

More like "Bile Driver," amirite?

F (1.42) / AVOID