Deja Brew
Columbia Brewery

I saw the description on the can and I (foolishly, as it turned out) assumed that Kokanee was the first of the Canadian macros to pursue the trend that's recently been big south of the border, of amping up the flavour of a macro in the spirit of a "classic" recipe (see Schlitz Gusto, the new Narragansett, etc.,.).

But don't be fooled: despite the misleading language on the can, this is your run of the mill Kokanee, albeit with a tiny amount of "1962-ish" glacial ice thrown into the recipe (i.e. scientists found an old glacier and realized you could actually estimate when the ice in said glacier actually froze, and then they took a sample from the glacier and sent it to Labatt).

In other words, then: colour is pale gold. Heavily carbonated. Thin, very corny. Some cracker and biscuit on the malt front, and maybe a whisper of hops (of the aroma, noble, not-so-affecting sort). Not egregiously bad, but certainly not worth seeking out. Your run of the mill American Adjunct Lager--would that a Canadian brew *would* take the US trend seriously and brew a "classic" version of their increasingly corn heavy beers.

355ml can, a marketing stunt, sure, but if a change in hops can warrant a new beer listing, then I posit that a change in water (the conceit here being that they dug up and brewed with some glacier ice that corresponds to Kokanee's 1962 roots) necessitates a new listing as well.

This beer pours a clear, pale golden straw colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, frothy, and rather fizzy bone-white head, which leaves some decent layered cloud lace around the glass as it evenly bleeds off.

It smells of bready, lightly doughy pale malt, corn grits, stale apple juice, a bit of wet cardboard, and musty, weedy, and faintly floral hops (not to mention the glacier water, with its aroma of, well, 'cold'). The taste is gritty, grainy corn bread and rice husks, more tepid and staid pome fruit esters, a lightly phenolic yeastiness, a twinge of plastic, and more plainly underwhelming earthy, weedy, and mildly skunky hops. Since the deep cold has worn off, no report on the water 'flavour' is currently feasible.

The carbonation is quite active in its fizzy and frothy probings of the various outposts of my palate, the body a so-so medium weight, and buoyed by a clammy, pithy, and less than pleasant attempt at some sort of smoothness. It finishes off-dry, both corny and ricey, a tad skanky, and mostly, yeah, watery.

Ok, they got me - not really, this single cost me all of a twoonie - but how am I to know what Kokanee tasted like over 50 years ago? Funny how they'll go whole hog and spare no expense to acquire something like a token amount of the water they're using, but won't spread some of that fiduciary love around to all the other cut corners in this product, glacier-sourced or not.