Scandal Lager
Pacific Western Brewing Company

 

A: Amber and clear.
S: Slightly sweet and fruity, like apple juice.
T: A decent lager, a bit grainy. Nothing to write home about, really, but not bad.

 

Just getting around to entering this review from a tasting I did a couple years ago - A very light beer with an IBU rating of 17, so quite balanced with an ever so slight bitterness. As well, everyone loved the packaging, from the return of the stubby bottle to the drinking game found on the inside of each six pack.

 

 

 

 

Poured from a stubby bottle into a flute. God, its great to still run into such bottles! Massive nostalgia ensues. As for the present brew, we've got a (darkish) ginger yellow hue with a shapely and large white head, showing rather superb retention. Aroma is sweet bready malts and fresh cut grass all the way. On the palate the beer is again bready, malty, and sweet, notably so for the style, evoking sugary dinner rolls, apple pomace, faint apricot and lemon fruit, papery dry brown spice, and licorice-like herbal hops. Fairly chewy body, substantive and almost syrupy by lager standards, with moderate carbonation. Great hay and sweetgrass hops in the finish although the sweet character persists right through to the end. Rather Helles-like. Of course, any beer from Prince George is going to have a coarse, "rough around the edges" character ;), and this sucker is indeed a bit grainy and rustic. Fortunately, this northern Saskie appreciates such charms.

341ml stubbie (awesome) bottle. At least PWB doesn't hide their origins on the labels of their sub-brand brews, like so many other chicken-shit Canadian brewers.

This beer pours a clear, pale golden yellow colour, with three fingers of puffy, bubbly, and loosely foamy eggshell white head, which leaves a bit of seeping paint splatter lace around the glass as it quickly dissolves.

It smells of gritty, grainy, pale malt, soft white toast, a touch of yeastiness, stale apples, and mildly leafy, weedy hops. The taste is more grainy, somewhat crackery pale malt, middling drupe fruit esters, a suggestion of lemon oil, and weak, kind of musty earthy, leafy hops.

The bubbles are quite sedate, just a tame frothiness pervading throughout, the body medium-light in weight, and fairly clammy in its pithy attempt at smoothness. It finishes off-dry, the grainy malt persisting, the fruit blowing off this gig, and the underwhelming hops holding true.

Obviously a degree or two above the Cariboos and Dudes of this brewer's storied oeuvre, but still rather uninspiring - nothing overtly wrong with it, but nothing of note to recommend it by, either. Fancy new packaging, and maybe an eschewing of adjunct grains in their base organic lager, is all this seems to be.