The 800 Block
Inner City Brewing

 

473ml can - I assume that the name here is in reference to the brewery's physical location in downtown Cowtown?

This beer pours a mostly clear, medium copper amber colour, with three fingers of puffy, rocky, and mildly bubbly off-white head, which leaves some stellar thickly cobwebbed lace around the glass as it evenly subsides.

It smells of gritty and grainy cereal malt, muddled domestic citrus rind, a further indistinct tropical fruitiness, stone paths after a hard rain, and some earthy, herbal, and piney green hop bitters. The taste is bready and biscuity caramel malt, orange and red grapefruit peel, more hard to discern exotic fruity notes, some damp minerality, and a plain leafy, musty, and resinous piney hoppiness.

The carbonation is adequate in its palate-satiating frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and generally smooth, with nothing really getting in the way of a swell time at this particular juncture. It finishes off-dry, the malt and hops in a lingering pas-de-deux.

Overall - this comes across as a dutiful version of the still kind of new-ish style, ticking all the suggested boxes, as it were. Full of flavour, and easy to put back, given the more or less restrained ABV. Worth seeking out, if I were to have anything to say about it.