Caribouze

Blimey! They've gone all-in for craft beer at Moosehead: an absolute plethora of "Small Batch" beers covering a whole range of styles of the sort that discerning beer drinkers demand. I'm intrigued to find out if the east Canadian industrial brewery, best known for very mainstream lager, is up to the challenge, so of course I bought all that I could get my hands on.

The one which caught my eye first was Small Batch Oatmeal Brown Ale, firstly because brown ale is such an under-represented beer style, and secondly because €2.99 for a 473ml can seemed very reasonable, especially at 5.7% ABV. This makes full use of that alcohol, smelling slightly dangerously of part-fermented summer fruit, marker pens and black herbal liqueurs from eastern European countries which no longer exist. That coalesces nicely in the flavour into a medium-sweet blend of strong coffee and fancy salted chocolate caramels which is pretty much exactly what I want from a brown ale. The oatmeal may be there to add body, and more power to it, but this beer is remarkably easy-going, showing an unexpected power to refresh aided by a fair bit of cleansing fizz. Superb work, and a high standard for the rest of the set.

From the same shop I bought Small Batch Session IPA -- this was originally supposed to be a two-beer post. There's nothing surprising in how it presents itself: a medium hazy orange with a generous but not inconvenient head. For all that it's attempting to ape craft beer, the can doesn't tell us what the hops are, only that it's 4.7% ABV. The aroma is sweetly citric, suggesting orangeade or thicker squash. That amounts to a lack of freshness; an absence of zing, and that's borne out by a flavour which presents hard candy and thick-shred marmalade. Again in defiance of craft convention, and indeed the law of this country, I have no way of knowing how fresh or otherwise the beer is: no readable date of production or minimum duration is given. However, what I'm tasting strikes me as the result of hop character fading with time. We're left with the malt and a slightly harsh bitterness. One might think that a beer this cheap would sell through more quickly. It's not offensive by any means, and I'm not going to quibble too hard given the price. I suspect there may be some playing-at-craft but not quite getting it at work by the big brewer here.

Small Batch East Coast is their take on hazy IPA: 5.9% ABV and promising melon and tropical fruit, according to the can. It's a bit pale and sickly looking, more witbier than IPA, though the stiff and lasting head is better than many small breweries can manage on these. The aroma is understated, offering nothing you wouldn't find in a bog-standard American-style pale ale. It's also disappointingly thin, offering no hazy fuzz and finishing on an unforgivable watery note. But the real surprise was the flavour. You can forget melons and mangoes; it's quite dry and has a strange woody spice quality, like cedar or cinnamon. Add to that a metallic aspirin tang for no good reason. Who tasted that and thought "Yep: East Coast. Can it and ship it"? It's not unpleasant, exactly, but it's a long way from what it purports to be. Confusion is better than distaste, I suppose. I still can't recommend this.

That's enough hops. There's a pilsner too: P.W.'s Czech Pilsner, depicting and named after the brewery's founder P.W. Moosehead (probably, I didn't read the explanation on the can). It's a middle-of-the-road 4.7% ABV and crystal clear. You can say what you like about industrial breweries trying to do craft, but when they want something to turn out transparent, it does. The aroma offers a faint hint of peppery noble hops but nothing else. And that's how the taste goes too. It's just on the side of being an acceptably characterful pils, but not far from generic boring industrial lager. There's an unwelcome vapid thinness too, of the sort which I think would be unrecognisable to a Czech drinker. I will here restate my controversial opinion that decoction really does count for something in the finished beer, and its absence here is why this doesn't feel or taste Czech. This is inoffensive fare. I appreciate that they've tried to up their game on lager, but it could stand to go up a fair bit more than this.

At the last sunset of summer, I caught Small Batch Raspberry Wheat Ale. I assumed this would be pink but it's actually a hazy orange. It definitely smells like raspberries, however, real and tart, with a little pink candy as well. The flavour reverts to sweet, and while there's a certain acidic tang within the gale-force raspberry concentrate, it's mostly just chew sweets and bubblegum. I'm not a fan, and object in particular to the way this presents as a summer beer but is far too thick and sticky to be refreshing. It's a typically clumsy attempt at being down-with-the-kids by an industrial-sized multinational.

And finally, Small Batch Blueberry Ginger: that's two of my favourite things, in beer, at once, for the first time. I'm in! The base is a 5.4% ABV blonde ale, presumably to let the fruit and spice do their thing in peace. It certainly looks a very plain yellow but smells dramatically of blueberry compote, plus a kick of ginger ale. No surprises, then. I'm still in. It's quite weighty, a substantial fizz is held back by a body which feels malt-driven but doesn't taste it. Instead it's all about the blueberries. There's no tartness, so they're not very real-tasting, but it channels blueberry desserts very well. The ginger is muted in the flavour, but hangs on in the background, the spice doing a little welcome work in balancing the sweetness. It's a very silly novelty, and seemingly designed to ensure it tastes very little like a beer. I enjoyed its particular brand of silliness, however. It's nice to get a blueberry beer that isn't all worthy about it, and actually tastes of blueberry.

So... I think the few hits on target here were lucky ones, and more to do with my personal taste than the brewery's ability to make interesting higher-end beer. Even at bargain basement prices, I think it's worth trading up past most of these.