Little Bend On The Prairie
Hell's Basement

355ml can - the name is a reference to their 'founding brewmaster', who hails from Bend, Oregon, and has created this 'Oregon Pale Ale', single-hopped with Mosaic.

This beer pours a clear, medium copper amber colour, with three fingers of puffy, finely foamy, and somewhat bubbly tan head, which leaves some random splattered and sudsy lace around the glass as it lazily subsides.

It smells of bready and doughy caramel malt, buttered white crackers, muddled domestic citrus flesh, further apple/pear fruity notes, and some weak leafy, earthy, and floral green hop bitters. The taste is gritty and grainy caramel malt, more buttery breakfast biscuits, still hard to differentiate citrusy esters, a hint of generic ground pepper, and some plain earthy, weedy, and dead floral verdant hoppiness.

The carbonation is quite low in its barely-perceptible frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and mostly smooth, in a slick sort of sense. It finishes well off-dry, the robust malt lingering like a recently triumphant sumo wrestler.

Overall, this is a pleasant enough sweet pale ale, with the expected hop onslaught never materializing, which is not what I recall from when I spent some quality time in the Bend area a few years ago. Easy to drink, sure, but this could be so much more.