Draft @ HDG. Clearish yellow with decent head retention. Taste is crisp and lighly sweet with a nice grain flavor. Finishes clean. Really tasty without being too watery or sweet.

4 ounce sample on tap at the California Brewer’s Festival. Sample #2. Fruity, estery, apple-like aroma with some lemon and a bit of citrus in the nose. Transparent light golden body with a small, white head. Apple cidery start, becoming grainy, biscuity, and malty. Finishes with a crisp, lightly citrus hoppiness. A lingering sweetness is also present. Not so sure how to style this ale is.

Clear yellow gold beer with a small white head. Smells light and sweet with a little fruityiness.The finish is a little bitey with a little ale sweetness as well. Essentially this tastes like their summerfest with ale yeast.

Tap at Blind Tiger. Taste is big on cereal grains, cookie, a bit vegetal, lightly fruity and mostly dry. A bit too heavy on the cereals to me, and almost maibock like. Light hoppyness from euro hops provide a decent bitter balance. Not as quenching as I’d like it to be. Not the best.

Draught pint at Sunset Grill on 6/7/07<br />Clear, apricot and golden body is minimally bubbly, with a small, white head perched atop precariously. Lacing is marginal.<br />Sharp in the nose, with a strong fruity hoppiness of apricot and unripe nectarine. It melds with a cereal-like grain quality to give more of the flaky, crisp aroma I would expect from a kolsch, but yet, there is still some of the fruitiness lingering even with warming. Some acetyldehyde, perhaps? It shows brief interludes of vanilla-cream-like sweetness, but manages to end with enough kolsch yeast bite and more of the odd, fruity acidity. Strange, but not altogether unappealing. Probably just some weird melding of aromatics between the hops and the malt. Medium aroma strength, no alcohol, possible acetyldehyde, though more likely just some other yeast bi-product or even hop fruitiness.<br />Lighter bodied than the Fishermans kolsch &#40;which I had prior to this&#41; but still with lots of sugar up front. It is rinsed from the palate by a very grainy, nearly tannic malt dryness that combines with some mineral notes and too much toasted malt acidity to really bite at the palate. I still can’t shake this slight notion of yellow fruits and apples that is slightly unsettling and seems to distract from the crispness and cleanliness that the style dictates. Still, the attenuation and body are its strong points and this is able to carry it past the slight shortcomings in flavor.