Narragansett Lager Beer

Narragansett Brewing Company
Brewed at City Brewery (Melanie Brewing Co)
Style: Pale Lager
Providence, Rhode Island USA

Serve in Dimpled mug, Lager glass, Shaker

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Mystery beer night. This is actually not a bad beer for two bucks. Doesn't smell like crap and is pretty decent. ---Rated via Beer Buddy for iPhone

What can I say, for a crappy pale lager in a can, it’s over of the best, but it is still just that, a tasteless pale lager you drink out of a can as a substitute to PBR.

Tap. Pours clear gold with thin, fizzy white head which quickly dissipates. Aroma is muted with notes of caramel, cereal malts, apples, light floral hops, and faint corn. Flavor is dry, bready malts forward with supporting light floral notes, corn, and light fruit. Light/medium body and low carbonation.

Has a clear, bubbly, medium yellow appearance with a fair amount of head that lingers for a while. Nose is malty and a little skunky. Smooth & light-bodied. Has balanced sweetness & bitterness, but is lacking in overall flavor and aroma. A textbook inoffensive beer.

Nothing, bad about it nut neither special. NICe aroma and easy to drink in a hot day too.

Can and Draught. Another massive macro water brew. Still if in New England this is the go to brew.

Skunk beer. Tasted like sweat and hops. Now brewed in New York. I knew it was bad when a beer that is namesaked for Rhode Island wasn’t brewed there. Novelty beer.

This beer is gross, it is like the New England version of a Papst Blue Ribbon (PBR). Gross go get something better.

Undated 16oz can served in a lager glass. Appearance: Sparkling clear, golden, and plenty both fine and coarse bubbles. Formed a nice foamy white head which had decent retention and provided surprisingly attractive lacing. Taste: too lightly flavored, yet the corn is more obvious upon tasting; lightly hopped, leaving it mildly sweet until the finish; fairly clean tasting. Mouthfeel: thin and crisp, with aggressive carbonation. O: not actually bad, but trivially different from other macro-brewery American Adjunct Lagers.

I poured a 16oz can into a lager glass. There was no obvious freshness date on it, though a code of 2982 leads me to believe it’s a Julian date of October 24, 2012 which would make it over four months old.

Appearance: Typical pale lager body that’s crystal clear, dark gold, and plenty bubbly. Forms an average size, white, foamy head which actually laces and retains well.

Smell: Strong corn odor, some metal. Reminds me of a bag of empty beer bottles.

Taste: Let’s not kid ourselves, Narragansett Lager doesn’t do a damn thing any of the countless other adjunct pale lagers don’t already do. Some are cleaner tasting than others, some are straight up foul. This approaches being one of the cleaner, sweeter brews, but is still noticeably flawed, so it’s on par with PBR or Budweiser.

This beer is likely brewed with a lot more corn than most of the style. It’s the same flavor as the water in canned corn. Though mild and bland throughout the first half of the palette, it quickly imparts a taste of tin and cardboard at the pinnacle of the swig. There’s next to no bitterness (which isn’t surprising considering it’s only 12 IBUs), and perhaps a touch of sweetness. I’ve tasted that flavor in superior pale lagers, and if that taste was as strong as those and less overtly dirty and oily, this could be at least decent. But as it stands, Narragansett Lager is just a generic fizzy yellow beer and not even a particularly good one at that.

Drinkability: The mouthfeel is thin, crisp, and wet but I don’t think it could honestly be considered refreshing. I’m actually surprised Narragansett Lager is 5% ABV since it feels like something lighter and more sessionable. Not that I think any true beer drinker will want to drink more than one serving at a time.