Coconspiratator
Bent Stick Brewing Co.

16 ounce can - split two ways.
Pours a clear dark amber brown with ruby highlights and a finger of creamy tan coloured head.
Aroma is super malty with bread notes, caramel, slightly nutty, hints of chocolate.
Taste is up front caramel malt sweetness, nutty, slightly vegetal, hints of cocoa, and a hop bitterness at the finish.
Tamely carbonated with medium mouthfeel - thinner than expected - the malt sweetness lingers a bit - 7.8% well hidden - smooth and easy drinking.

473ml can - a 'collaboration' with a partner industrial brewery in Calgary, which weirdly only brews their own stuff for export. Ok, then.

This beer pours a clear, dark amber-highlighted brown colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, loosely foamy, and bubbly tan head, which leaves some decent pockmarked limestone cliff wall lace around the glass as it lazily sinks out of sight.

It smells of bready and doughy cereal malt, some oily nuttiness, hints of cafe-au-lait, dark cocoa powder, and a very tame earthy, musty, and dead leafy noble hoppiness. The taste is grainy and biscuity caramel malt, nutty chocolate milk, gritty coffee grounds, some indistinct bruised black pome fruitiness, and more well-understated leafy, musky, and ephemeral herbal hop bitters.

The carbonation is fairly meek in its palate-boring frothiness, the body a solid medium weight, and generally smooth, with perhaps a touch of alcohol ingress making some unwelcome inroads here. It finishes off-dry, the malt in its various guises commanding the lingering lifeboat to hell.

Overall - this comes off as a pretty affable version of the style, with a heady malt profile, and a booze quotient that keeps it duly under the radar, even with the very traditional label images, as it were. Worth seeking out, as this yo-yo Spring keeps us in suspense, in more ways than the typical one.