Blind Mole
Wild Clover Breweries

340ml bottle, part of a quartet of offerings from this South African craft brewery to recently find their way to Alberta bottleshop shelves. Handwritten (?) best before date of April 10, 2017.

This beer pours a slightly hazy, medium copper amber colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, chunky, and creamy off-white head, which leaves some nice loosely webbed lace around the glass as it slowly but surely abates.

It smells of biscuity and bready caramel malt, some apple and pear-like fruitiness, faint notes of gasohol, and further earthy, leafy, and dead grassy green hop bitters. The taste is semi-sweet, bready and doughy caramel malt, muddled pome and citrus fruit, a hint of earthy spiciness, and more tame leafy, weedy, and grassy verdant hoppiness.

The carbonation is obviously quite involved, via its swirling frothiness, the body a solid middleweight, and mostly smooth, with a wee airy creaminess arising as things warm up a tad around here. It finishes well off-dry, the caramel malt contending with a very minor lingering hoppy counterpoint.

Overall, you could easily convince me that this is an amber ale, rather than any sort of worldly Pils - it's just too sweet, hardly crisp at all, and not particularly hop-blessed. Yeah, not a bad brew to put back, but expectations (y'know, from the label, and everything) are a bitch sometimes.