What can you say?  Here is another beer in the can that I tried to prove to myself that canned beer can be excellent.  I think I was right.  Old Chub is a Scottish style, wee heavy ale.  It's a "wee heavy" because it weighs in at 8% ABV.  I bought this beer for $11.99 in six pack form.  I would buy it again and again for that price. Here is what I thought of this beer. The Pour: This lovely beer was a deep reddish-brown.  It was clean looking and wonderful in the glass.  One thing that bugged me a bit is that Old Chub couldn't keep it up...the head, that is.  However, that it not an insurmountable downfall, so I decided to keep giving it a whirl. The Nose: Typical of most Scottish Ales, Old Chub had very little to tell on the hops.  I rejoice over this fact, as it is not quite appropriate for the style.  Tons of sweet malt, to the point of being syrupy, graced the nose of this beer.  I noted a tinge of metallic aromas on the very front.  Hints of alcohol came through, along with touches of caramel.  There was also an aroma ...

Part of our “Yes, You can Can” series, Oskar Blues's Ten Fidy, is a big beer. Ten Fidy is nine-fifty (9.5% ABV), which makes it a higher octane ale. It has to be one the best canned beers that I’ve ever had; hopefully, I’ll have a lot more data to add to that later on. On to the review. The Pour: TF was pretty black in color with a tall and stable, dark brown head. It looked thick, dark, and foreboding in the glass. The Nose: Sweetness, alcohol, and roast were my first impressions of the beer. The second sniff let me catch some molasses qualities as well as raisiny fruit aromas. Coffee and chocolate could also be noted. The Taste: TF had a nice mouth-feel. This beer was sticky and somewhat sweet in approach. Of course the alcohol and roast could also be tasted. The glass had some nice lacing on it as the beer inevitably receded down the side. Bitter coffee and chocolate left a lasting impression as the beer faded. Overall, I think this is a pretty good beer and a nice price. I paid $10.99 for a four pack of what amounts to eight beers worth. If you are normally ...

Ever love to have a nice, easy drinking, un-complicated beer during the summer? Many of us default to Heineken, Budweiser, or some other big name lager over the summer months. I, for one, don’t mind drinking a heavy stout on the hottest summer day. I know that I’m a weirdo, so I don’t expect the same out of everyone else.  Many of you are weirdos, too…I can feel it. However, there are some normal people among us, so I want to talk about a beer in the vein of the first line of this post. I mentioned before that I wanted to review a few canned beers for the next little bit, so I want to start with a good, clean, and simple summer beer from Oskar Blues. Mama’s Little Yella Pils is obviously a Pilsner style beer, which is in the lager family. (If you want to brush up on Pilsner or the meaning of these various terms, click here.) I also want to mention that this might be a good gateway beer to get your friends drinking more craft stuff. It’s still very much like what they are used to, just better. The Pour: MLYP poured with a very ...

Canned beers are the screw top wines of the beer world. People tend to look at a beer in a can with suspicion in the same way that they look distrustfully at a wine without a cork (or even with a rubber cork). Unlike the wine world, it is easier to be iconoclastic in the world of beer. So, I decided to try a few more beers in the can. Nate has already done a review of Genesee Bock, so he is a little ahead of me in this respect (and there's Nate at his cheesiest). But I want to appeal to you that you try a beer or two in the can. For some time, it has been normal to see some better European beers in a can. For instance, Wexford was one of our earlier beers. Yet, these beers have some appeal simply because they have a “widget” in them. This hardly seems like something that should exclude a beer from consideration, that is, whether or not there is a widget. But otherwise, it seems that a beer being packaged in a can is enough to get some people disconcerted to avoid a beer that they would normally enjoy.  I ...