Dakota Lager
Matt Brewing Company / Saranac Brewery

A fellow beer writer who knows of my affinity for CANned beer in support of The CANQuest (tm) dropped this off for me. Mine seems to have been brewed in Smithton, PA, so maybe it will be better than the Utica, NY version. Yeah, sure.

From the CAN: "Mountain Fresh, Naturally Smooth".

The Crack! allowed for some foaming through the vent, so I sat back and let it run for a little while. When it proved to be unabating, I went for an inverted Glug. If you think that I have had problems with foaming in the past, this was off of the hizzy! I ended up with two-plus fingers of dense, rocky, bone-white head that swelled up and fell away just as quickly. Color was a Golden-Amber (SRM = > 5, < 7) with NE-quality clarity, prompting an impromptu visit from The Gelt Gang of Mammon, Midas & Croesus, all scrambling for a taste. Nose hearkened back to the dark, early days of The CANQuest (tm) - it smelled like stale apple juice! Man, the initial going was tough. I simply wanted to introduce an accessible, levelling medium to the whale/wale/whalez chasing craze that was so in vogue at the time. Drink some of these and others of its ilk & see how your liver feels about you. Mine has not spoken to me since. Mouthfeel was thin-to-medium, just avoiding being downright watery. This had an odd vanilla-apple flavor, which I will take over corn-driven silage, but still pretty off-putting. Guh. You wonder what the recipe for these things looks like. Finish was semi-dry, but it didn't matter. It is retired, with good cause, and I am retiring my CAN, also. Foo!

Due to the mystery of the unknown, an intriguing blue box and a $6.99 a case price tag, a friend of mine and I decided to spend an evening with Dakota, not knowing that it may be the worst beer brewed in the United States.

Albeit that we were initially told by the cashier that it was brewed in Philadelphia, this nightmare is brewed in Utica, New York... and it should have never left.

Watery taste, almost-translucent appearance and absolute lack of personality are the traits of this lager, which is like the replicant of beers; it looks like a beer, smells like a beer and kind of tastes like a beer, but inside it is not a real, living, breathing beer.

Dakota Lager pours a clear golden body beneath a creamy head of bright white that holds fairly well and leaves initial rings of lace about the glass.

The nose is a touch perfumey with alcohol and fermentation esters combined with a hint of the underlying lightly sweet and subtly grainy maltiness. No hops are present except for indistinguishable background notes.

In the mouth it's delicately crisp and a bit creamy, with a dextrinous medium body and median carbonation.

The flavor offers some of the same estery character found in the nose, indicating that it's fermented hot and quick. The alcohol doesn't really stand out like it would in a malt liquor, but it's present. The maltiness is sweetish, and suggests a fair amount of adjunct (kind of like the flavor of watered-down polypropolyne glycol). Hops are relegated to an underlying current of muddled grassy, mildly floral (or is that fermentation?), and herbal notes. Cluster? It's soft and round (flabby even) with the sugary non-grainy malt acting as the main component, balanced only by a dull sublime bitterness and edge of alcohol. It finishes short and dry with some evaporating fumes of alcohol. The hint of hops appears again in the burp.

This is what beer tastes like when you're really drunk. And after tasting the Dakota Kick at 6.0%, I'm guessing that this is the same beer with some water added to take it down to around 5.0%. A little more water probably makes Dakota Light. I can't recommend this in any way, except to say that I don't recommend it. Even within the economy price tier, there are much better beers available.