Deschutes Cascade Ale

Bottle at Stockholm Beerfestival. Cloudy golden coloured with a white head. Aroma of malts, caramel and brewmash. Flavour of malts, caramel and hops.

[Bottled at Stockholm Beer Festival] Clear golden, no head. Lightly citric grapefruit aroma. Medium sweet with soft edges, light body and some bready malt. Fairly low bitterness. A refreshing light ale.

12-oz. Medium straw color, almost hazy, with a little dollop of white on top. Decent suggestion of piney hop on the nose, but nothing to write home about, especially at the end of a nice long summer on the west coast. Medium mouth feel with a fair field of rising carb. The flavor doesn’t really amount to much; this is a lawn mower beer with a little dab of malt and a little dab of hop. It’s fairly well made, but it’s definitely made with the recent mega-lager graduate in mind. Compared to Black Butte or Obsidian, this is a cigarette snuck in the boy’s room at school next to a Davidoff cigar.

What is this? Certainly not one of Deschutes greater achievments. A mild summer beer that is excellent for drinking when it’s hot out or whiles fishing or something. A terrible beer for sitting down and analyzing. The only thing I liked was the refreshing crisp bite present in the mouthfeel. Get something else please. This has potential, but need refining. Worth trying once.

Mild, mild hop aromas, hint of grass and wet blanket. Bottle, Best by 6-29-06, the date is 6-19-06. I think I do detect an old flavor. Something in it tastes a little like some bad lagers I’ve had. It’s not bad, it just looks like it will be really good. naive.

I don’t know what the intentions were behind this beer and its name, but the name had me expecting more. The waord cascade evokes hops, not only because of the specific type of hop but because of the region responsible for most of the hops in America. This doesn’t NOT taste like hops, but it doesn’t stand out as a hoppy beer. IN fact, it doesn’t stand out at all. It seems almost watered down, and is by far Deschutes’ most [only] flavorless beer.

This brew has a slightly hazy amber body, with a cream head topping it off. The scent is of bitter hops. These hops dominate the flavor, seem to be a different variety of hops than most PAs. Under those are a nice sweet malt base, with a spicy bite. Overall this is a good beer.

On tap at Cooper’s in Seattle

Pours light gold with a relatively small head. The odor is weak, bits of sour hops and grain and hints of belgian-style yeast. The flavor follows, dominated by grains, a bit of sourness, pale malt, hints of orange peel, with a metallic hop finish. This is an unimpressive brew, the sort that you might drink if you desperately needed a beer in some midwest airport bar -- but it’s not the sort of thing you’d expect from a good local microbrewery. I’m disappointed here; it’s as if Deschutes has decided to compete with Petes and Sam Adams instead of with Stone and Elysian.