One Shot Left
Hell's Basement

 

Poured from a crowler from the Brewer's Apprentice.

Appearance - Pours a clear copper amber with three fingers of frothy white head.

Smell - citrus and earthy hops, orange and lemon peel, hint of tropical fruits, bready malts, caramel, and earthy yeast.

Taste - citrus and earthy hops followed quickly into the orange and lemon peel and hint of tropical fruits. The bready malts, caramel, and earthy yeast finish off the brew.

Mouthfeel - Medium bodied with moderate carbonation. Finishes slightly sticky with the malts and hops lingering.

Overall - A well rendered version of the NE IPA. It is fruity indeed, but I feel the hops are a tad lacking but overall the flavour is nicely done.

355ml can - made to celebrate the 20th anniversary of a Medicine Hat punk band called One Shot Left.

This beer pours a mostly clear, medium copper amber colour, with four frets of puffy, loosely foamy, and bubbly off-white head, which leaves some decent dispersing fog bank pattern lace around the glass as it rather lazily subsides.

It smells of bready and doughy caramel malt, muddled domestic citrus rind, further hard to parse tropical fruity notes, a hard water flintiness, and some plain earthy, musty, and piney green hop bitters. The taste is gritty and grainy caramel malt, a lesser toffee sweetness, orange and lemon citrus rind, generic melon flesh, some damp minerality, and more understated leafy, weedy, and resinous piney hoppiness.

The carbonation is fairly lame in its barely-there frothiness, the body a solid middleweight, and actually quite smooth, with a wee airy creaminess arising as things warm up a tad out of the ol' basement bar fridge. It finishes off-dry, the mixed frooty essences showing the most lingering vigor.

Overall - this is indeed a well-flavoured offering, nice and fruity, with very little attendant bitterness. Don't know how it would sell to a middle-aged punk rock show crowd, but I'm glad that I got a chance to try it.