Bards Tale Dragons Gold

Brewed by Gordon Biersch Brewing Company
Style: Specialty Grain
Palo Alto, California USA

Bottle. Pours a pee yellow with no head at all. Aroma is strange:condensed milk, raspberry, but not as creamy smelling as that sounds. Flavor similarly weird. Just sorta sweet. Lots of berries, blue and black in particular. Finishes with that pretty predictably apple skin bitterness, and a whole lot of the flavor (hands around for a while). Mouth feel not too bad, like skim milk. Not sure how to react to this beer. Defiantly not what I was expecting. Worth having once, but I personally don’t think I would get it again. Unique.

Pours golden with a fully receding beige head. Aroma of sweet grain, cider, toffee, and molasses. Taste is lightly sweet and ever so slightly bitter, with a buttered bread finish. Medium bodied with spritzy carbonation and a lingering finish. This beer fared a bit better on a rerate, but it’s still not an easy drinker. Original: 6/2/4/2/7 2009.07.26: 6/3/5/2/8

Pours a brilliantly clear, full gold color and is topped by a frothy, large bubbled, initially half-finger thick, quickly disappearing, pale off-white colored head. The aroma has a certain beery quality to it, but is also mixed with a sweet spiciness akin to something like cinnamon or something I am not quite sure what. Definitely has an exotic grain character to it; something I would describe as an earthy grain aroma.

The taste is quite light, this must have a very low final gravity, at least it tastes like it. Almost to the point of being thin. The thinness is not helped by a unbalanced sweetness that is just asking for more hop bitterness. There is some bitterness here, it just is not sufficient to balance the sweet grainy quality. Lightly spicy & herbal hop notes are also here, more than in a macro lager perhaps, but not by much. This does a pretty good job of mimicing a malt & adjunct lager, it perhaps has a touch of earthy grain character, which might be out of place, but it is even less that what is in the aroma. I understand the market they are going for here & I applaud the purpose of this beer, but I really wish this had been something like a stout (which would be easy to do by the way). This tastes amazingly bland and crappy just like your favorite macro lager, an interesting concept and hopefully it foretells of interesting things to come.

Purchased: <a href=http://www.ratebeer.com/Places/ShowPlace.asp? Liquors, Tucson, AZ

Well, I’ve never had sorghum beer before, but this stuff smells and tastes exactly as bad as I expected it would. Yet another reason I am glad I don’t have celiac. Grassy, and sweetly putrid, and surprisingly expensve at $2.50/12oz

I finally get to try a sorghum beer. I appreciate that this beer was low hopped so I could focus on the grain character. Its pretty different - sweet and caramelly with notes of molasses and maple syrup. A bit on the thin side, and overall plain and sweet enough to just deter me from wanting to drink it. If I couldn’t have glutens, I wouldn’t be real happy about having to drink this as a go-to beer. I’d ask them to just dump in a bunch of hops to mask the rest. Copper color, and a bit lifeless in the glass.

12 oz. bottle - Pours a clear golden color with a thin white head. Has a sour, grassy, grainy aroma. Flavor is much better than the aroma. Has sweet caramel malt flavor. A dry, medium body beer. Worth a try.

Pours pale gold w/ a shallow spritzy froth. Aroma of bitter malt and a hint of butterfinger. Light nectar w/ ample residual effers. Flavors are zesty, clean, crisp, and refreshing. I detect on the slightest detail a smokey, spicey, fruit quality w/ a sliver of tartness. Tastes lke beer. I like it. Like a good pilsener. Finish has a moderate bitterness.

I have tryed one other sorghum beer, besides this one. And this one blew the other away. It was slightly darker than expected with a light caramel color. The taste reminded me of a wheat beer, but with a differant sort of grassyness to it. Nice and cloudy with a good amount of flavor in every sip, truly something different in the beer world.