Cold Spring Lager

Formerly brewed at Cold Spring Brewery
Style: Pale Lager
Cold Spring, Minnesota USA

Serve in Dimpled mug, English pint, Lager glass, Shaker

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Golden-straw colour. No head retention nor visible carbonation. It looks like a urine sample. That’s not good. It has a sweet, heavily estery aroma like banana candy, hints of pineapple, rotting apples. Holy shit this is foul stuff. The flavour is very sweet, with fusels, all sorts of dirty, rotting things and sure, a touch of malt.

It claims to be all-malt, yet it’s one of the foulest brews I’ve ever experienced. So let’s deconstruct this a bit. The carbonation/head retention is a function of low leve of CO2 injection and the fact that the beer was frozen and then thawed (oops). The lack of hops will affect head retention, but it also points to a lack of artificial head stabilizer, which is the only thing that holds a head up on most macrobrews. The fusels are a function of high gravity brewing, but might also be good old ethanol exposed by lack of other flavours and working in concert with the nasties. As for those nasties...it’s not adjuncts because there aren’t any. In fact, the mouthfeel is full enough to support the all-malt claim. In the CIS, beers made on ancient Soviet equipment tend to be exposed to all sorts of weird things and this results in bizarre off-flavours much like what I’m tasting here. I’m guessing you won’t find spotless modern equipment at Gluek. Yeast is a big factor, too, I suspect. A dirty yeast can come about in a number of ways but the result is dirty-tasting beer like this. Also, some of the foulness may have blown off had the beer been lagered longer. The flavours, however, aren’t at all rounded but are harsh leading me to believe that the beer hasn’t been lagered for more than about six minutes. Ingredient selection - the yeast is a travesty. The hops are non-existent. You cannot taste them anywhere and this beer might only have 6-8 IBUs, substandard even for a macrobrew. This leaves you with malt, dirty yeast and the more-or-less standard water, alcohol and CO2, none of which play an unusual role here. Beer this bad is educational.

What Oakes said in spades! All I can add is that I rated this so low on flavor and aroma because it has NONE...no taste except carbonation and a sour, dry rice beer taste..like an Ashai dry with no taste or flavor. This is like a club soda with alcohol.

The 2 tone color scheme on the cans led me to think this beer was a very cheaply made product...but once poured I was a little more optimistic. The aroma was a good balance of hops and malts...with an odd chemical undertone...whose origin I’m scared to discover. The flavor was not bad, and offered more than your typical macro...although this isn’t a beer to write home about. Overall, I think this is a viable option when looking to buy low price beer without resorting to a mountain crest!

Very plain white can with blue writing and a cartoon water droplet telling you "It’s the spring water". An Olympia clone? Not a bad look to the beer. Gold with a relatively lasting white foam. Lite vanilla and vegetable aroma. Lite flavoured beer. Off taste like a sweet drinkable malt liquor perhaps, but not terrible. Some sweetness and maybe a dash of hops. Cheap beer lovers could get used to it. Obviously not marketed to the RB crowd.