Vulcan Ale
Paddock Wood Brewing Co.

Vulcan Ale from Harvest Moon Brewing Company. Not a bad little Irish Red. Very malty with a bit of alcohol on the tongue. Kinda reminds me of a barley wine without the high ABV, ONLY 5.4%.

355ml bottle, procured last month from a store on the dusty, tumbleweed-strewn main street of bucolic Vulcan, Alberta. Said store apparently has this custom-made for them by Paddock Wood, to go with all the other Star Trek tourist paraphernalia and traps littered throughout the town.

After a gushing spurter during cap-pop (not the first from this brewer, but what do you expect for a weird one-off?), this beer pour a deep, dark aquamarine food colouring hue, like your finest Blue Squishee, or favorite mouthwash, with three fingers of tightly foamy and frothy blue icing head, which settles rather quickly, rendering a few straggling specks of sudsy lace around the glass.

It smells of faint grainy, bready malt, some orchard fruitiness, a slight plastic astringency, and very mild earthy hops. The taste is sweet grainy, biscuity pastry, and somewhat sour doughy malt, a phenolic twinge, and sadly timid, shy leafy, and fruity hops.

The carbonation, after its initial jailbreak, still shows some perkiness, the body a decent enough medium weight, and surprisingly smooth, if you close your eyes. It finishes fairly off-dry, the muddled biscuit graininess contending with a weak, but rising, metallic edge.

Well, this is a shit-heap better than that Romulan Ale disaster I tried last year - maybe using a craft brewery instead of a Central American industrial concern tips the scales, I dunno. Anyway, this stuff sure looks the part, not that I remember explicitly what "Vulcan"-style ale looked like in the various incarnations of the Trekkie universe. And what follows is essentially an above average, um, cough, cough, 'red' ale. Since there's no category for Blue Ale, or Alien Ale, though, I'm just going to classify it as if I were blind. Worth it to try, if only for the novelty alone.