City LaCrosse Lager

Brewed by City Brewery (Melanie Brewing Co)
Style: Pale Lager
La Crosse, Wisconsin USA

Serve in Dimpled mug, Lager glass, Shaker

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12 oz can into 16 oz. snifter (yeah, I know, a snifter is overkill for a lawnmower beer). Light, slight grain/corn aroma. Pours perfectly clear, golden, with reasonable head. Flavor of malt and corn; minimal hops. Not as thin as other lawnmower beers. Pretty good for a beer that comes in 30-pack cans.

Well LaCrosse used to be the home of Blatz and for that I salute them. For this I give them the FINGER! Who poured sugar and corn syrup into my beer!??? I thought I was drinking a corn flavored soda. NEVER AGAIN. NEVER. Hang tight with the Blatz and the bitches will be pounding down your door. Hang with this and expect a lot of digital oscillation (from yourself) of your male member. Shameful! Is this the treatment our boys in uniform deserve?

A pour man’s MDG or Bud. I’m not a huge fan of lagers in general, but I found this to be skunky which is a bit odd as I had it poured from a can into a pint glass.

Contrary to rumors posted all over the internet, this is not the original recipe for Heilman’s Old Style, although it’s brewed at the same place. The only reason you will want to try this is because it’s cheaper than other 30-packs of canned beers you despise. Pours a normal yelow with very little head. Aroma is full of corn and sour apples, with a slight metallic aftertaste.

Tap at Bodega in La Crosse, WI. Not much going on with this beer - pale yellow pour with a small white head. Kind of a foul nose of stale grain. Very light palate. Taste is corn and grain - simple and boring.

Straw yellow with a large head that fades away faster than I can type this sentence. Aroma is sweet, grassy and adjuncted, hello pale lager. I guess I’m a sucker for my home states clicks, so for 39 cents I couldn’t pass this one up. Thin, corny, metallic, grassy and sweetly malted with a touch of honey, this reminds me of my younger days when I’d buy the cheapest beer I could find. It’s better than the beers those a-holes brew at Miller Coors who are pushing to thwart the craft beer movement in Wisconsin (along with the jackass we voted in as governor).

Extremely cheap, but yet it is somehow better than the standard highlifes and buds

UPDATED: DEC 31, 2010 Poured a pale yellow-gold color with a decent head that slowly faded to lace. Aroma was slightly sweet of malts and grains. Taste was similar with malts beginning with a slight sweetness. Corn and grains could be detected in the background with a light hop finish. Palate was decent. Overall, I was a bit surprised how nice a smooth this stuff was. The can said it was fully Krausened, which I would believe. Overall a nice surprise considering how cheap this stuff is.

As you can see, I am a strong advocate of cheap pale lagers. They catch a lot of flak, but in reality, they are important beers. For most of us in America and Canada, a shitty pale lager was probably our first beer. They have fueled more parties and made more family reunions bearable than any other style of beer. La Crosse lager, how ever is one beer that cannot get my gutter-punk seal of approval. On a school training trip to La Crosse, WI, I thought it appropriate to sample the city’s own beer. At $8 a case (in La Crosse at least), it was an easy buy, but the drinking was another story. Even chilled down in a hotel sink filled with ice, my first sip of this runoff was a shock to my system. It was sickeningly sweet, like many of its bargain brother are, but with a repulsive after taste. Chugging (my weapon of choice against bad beers) was useless against this vile brew. After nearly ten minutes, I finished my last sip. Later that day, we passed by the City Brewery (which is guilty of brewing this junk), which claims to have "The World’s Biggest 6-Pack" (six large brewery silos dressed up to look like La Crosse tallboys). Already drunk off of delicious Pearl Street Brewery beers, I had my buddy pull over for pictures of the "6-Pack". I didn’t have a camera. I just wanted to piss on homeland of this vile beer. Avoid at all costs unless economic conditions leave you no choice.

Not as bad as I was led to believe. Just another pale lager. Corn aroma and taste. A little malty.