It takes a lot of prompting to get me to try any non-alcoholic beer. Choice has never been greater, but by and large they just don't taste like real beer. That goes especially for the lager and pale ale versions, which seem to make up the bulk of the segment. Anyway, I've heard good things about today's pair, enough to make me go out and buy them. Both are from trustworthy US stalwart Sierra Nevada.First up is Trail Pass Golden, which is indeed golden, and west-coast clear. The aroma is lightly lemony, although I also get a hint of the excess sweetness which usually plagues non-alcoholic beer. Sure enough, the flavour is highly sugary, suggesting a diluted orange cordial rather than a beer. In its favour it doesn't have the clanging metallic off-flavour that's another common problem with these, but that's not much comfort. I guess they're going for the lager market with this, and if non-alcoholic lager is something you drink regularly, then here's an inoffensive, clean-tasting, thirst-quenching example. As a beer substitute, however, it misses the mark significantly.
It being Sierra Nevada, I thought Trail Pass IPA would be amber coloured, but it turned out to be a very pale yellow, and slightly murky too. The aroma is much sweeter than the previous one, that light lemon zest becoming full-on fruit-chew candy. Strangely, there's not much of anything in the flavour this time. It's certainly not overly sweet, and has quite a pleasant dry cracker-like malt base. The hops, again, are orangey, tasting a bit dull and artificial, with none of the intensity that a proper American IPA ought to have. There's also a twang of that metallic aspirin effect, meaning it's not really much different to most other alcohol-free IPAs, which is unfortunate. I wouldn't trade a real beer for this one either.And so my scepticism continues. If Sierra Nevada can't make a convincing non-alcoholic pale beer, I'm not sure anyone else will.
Hi there - a bit off-topic here but I tracked your blog down via a comment youn left some years ago on a discussion about Guinness in the USA as I'm trying to settle an argument among regulars at our local bar in Tampa.
ReplyDeleteFolk here reckon American Guinness tastes different to Irish Guinness although I contend it's all the same as it's all brewed in Ireland anyway.
Some say even the stuff in cans is different but I can't find any records online if where this is done in the US.
Can I prevail upon you to settle the argument.
Is all Guinness sold in America imported either as a finished product or as a type of syrup imported and added with local water as some also reckon.
And are the cans the same on both sides of the pond ?
I've tried to find all this out online but Guinness seems deliberately vague about such stuff.
I really like your blog by the way.
Thanks for the kind words. Short answer: Draught Guinness in the US is exactly the same Draught Guinness we get in Ireland. A company like Diageo wouldn't tolerate product differentiation and has all the quality assurance procedures and robust point-of-sale interventions to ensure it doesn't happen. It's telling, I think, that nobody who expresses an opinion of the relative quality of one pint over another does so in the vocabulary of proper sensory analysis. They can never say *how* it tastes different, in terms that a trained beer judge, for example, would understand. Having an opinion on what is good Draught Guinness and what isn't is a way of presenting as an expert without having any actual training or qualifications. It's for bar-room blowhards, basically.
DeleteThat said, it's not imported as the finished product. Like all industrial beers, Guinness is brewed at high-gravity and watered down to sale strength closer to the market. So the Draught Guinness you get in the US is made with American water, but they have reverse-osmosis technology which means the water they add in America or the UK is chemically identical to the water they add in Ireland.