Tusker Finest Quality Lager | East African Breweries Ltd (Kenya Breweries)

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%
look: 3.25 | smell: 3.25 | taste: 3.25 | feel: 3.25 | overall: 3.25

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%
look: 3.25 | smell: 3.25 | taste: 3.25 | feel: 3.25 | overall: 3.25

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%
look: 3.25 | smell: 3.25 | taste: 3.25 | feel: 3.25 | overall: 3.25

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.25/5  rDev +7.6%
look: 3.5 | smell: 3.5 | taste: 3 | feel: 3 | overall: 3.5

5-26-19 - poured into a personalized pilsner glass - 335ml/ 12 Fl.OZ. capped bottle

Appearance: Pours a straw yellow with a nice, bubbly, white head that slowly reduces to slight and thin. Some slight lacing that mainly stays with the head.

Smell: Aroma of sweet malt, grassy hops, floral notes and a hint of minor skunkiness.

Taste: This beer is grainy and doughy, but all-around light in flavor and a little watery.

Mouthfeel: Moderate to high carbonation. The feel is smooth, but thin with a watery finish.

Drinkability: This beer is drinkable and reasonably refreshing, but nothing especially distinguishable ever materializes.

Comments: A lager that surprised me a little. I did not expect much, but this beer did leave me believing I may have missed something about it. However, in the end a run-of-the-mill lager.

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3.25/5  rDev +7.6%
look: 3 | smell: 3 | taste: 3 | feel: 3.5 | overall: 4

This pours an extreme pale gold,so pale I'm not sure I"ve ever seen one so light in color,the head looks nice and bleach white,with lots of lace left behind.The nose is strange to me like chlorine or somthing so clean It almost has no smell.This tastes like raw uncooked spagetti noodles,with some grassy grainy flavors on the tail.It's light in body and semi creamy even,finishing extremly crisp and clean.Not bad at all,refreshing,easy drinker.

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3.25/5  rDev +7.6%

3.24/5  rDev +7.3%
look: 3.5 | smell: 3.25 | taste: 3.25 | feel: 3 | overall: 3.25

Pours gold in color, clear, with 1/4 inch head. Taste is honey and sweet toasted malt. Above average, tasty, clean lager. Not something I would rush out to get, but certainly enjoyable.

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3.23/5  rDev +7%
look: 3.5 | smell: 3 | taste: 3.5 | feel: 3 | overall: 3

Half-litre staid stubby-esque bottle, best before Jan 2010, on a sunny autumnal Sugarbowl patio.

This beer pours a clear pale golden straw colour, with two fingers of weakly puffy, soapy dirty white head, which leaves some attractively consistent webbed webbed lace around the glass as it genially recedes.

It smells of semi-sweet, pale grainy malt, mashed corn grits, and some earthy, weedy, dead leafy hops. The taste is more sweet corn and glutenous white grain 'maltiness', a touch of light diacetyl, stale minced apples, and more earthy, dead-eyed leafy hops.

The carbonation is fairly low, and generally less than obsequious, the body a weak-ass medium weigh, tacitly smooth, and more mealy than anything else. It finishes on the mostly dry side, with a tame-ass malt ceding everything to that wee bit of floral essence among a lingering, mostly unpleasant vegetal weediness.

A barely decent enough tipple for the style, as transposed across a few continents and an ocean or so, meaning that being an interesting thing to try from East Africa trumps overtly rejecting it as the same shit produced in the 'western world'. I don't know where to justify that particular piece of commercial and geo-political bullshit, but I'm not about to grab another of these, all the same.

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3.23/5  rDev +7%
look: 3.5 | smell: 3 | taste: 3 | feel: 3 | overall: 4

This is not the Tusker Premium Lager... it's the export version of the regular Tusker Lager with the black, white and yellow label depicting an elephant in profile. It has a standard neck label rather than the gold foil of the "Premium Lager". It's strength is only 4.2% compared to the 5.0% of the "Premium", and it's starting gravity is lower at 1038 vs 1044. In addition to it's slightly thinner body, it's also much less hoppy in the nose. The adjunct is sugar, and it appears to be utilized at a much higher rate than the Premium's 10%.

Legend has it that this beer was named after an angry bull elephant that trampled to death one of the two brothers (George Hurst in 1923) that founded the brewery. It was reported to be Ernest Hemingway's favorite beer, and it's the largest selling beer in Kenya.

It pours a clear straw-gold body topped by a full and creamy bright-white head that holds fairly well before dropping, and leaves some nice lace. The bouquet expresses a grainy malt sweetness with some mild grassy and floral hoppiness in the background. The body is thin but exceptionally smooth across the palate with a fine carbonation. The palate is limited to a gently sweet maltiness that's obviously thinned by a liberal use of adjunct; and balanced by an understated bitterness. Some minor floral hop flavor is present if you seek it out, but doesn't present itself otherwise. It finishes short and sweet, just vanishing from the palate in much the same way it came in. It's a teasing beer that continually leaves you looking for more, which adds to it's drinkability but not much else. It's refreshing and light - easy to drink, but lacking in character.

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