Continuing on the tour of crap beer, another light but this one’s from the maker of my beloved Black & Tan. And actually it’s not the terriblest. The color is nearly amber, but we can assume that this is caramel food coloring. Like most lights, this one’s about 100 calories per dose, or fashionably just under that, 99 in this instance.
And in this instance the taste is probably the best light i’ve had, but that’s like saying it’s the dumbest rock in the quarry. It’s a light beer so it’s watery, doesn’t smell like beer, rather some kind of pungent soap. The taste is beer-water so don’t be fooled by the color. A step above some lights, on its own this beer-like liquid rates 2.3.
Not for solo consumption, but i bought it for this anti-quest, and it works just fine for blending with YB&T. They are cousins, after all. And they kiss like it. Together they make a beer which is not sad to drink when you’re chilling, although Yuengling Light is also as sweet as Yuengling Black & Tan, so the combination is fairly darned sweet. I don’t think i could binge-watch some show with this as my only blended beer.
A light beer so expect a light taste… and a light score here. But it is one of the few light beers which is drinkable on its own, without spiking it with a few oz of black-n-tan or a stout. And “light” is almost an understatement here, the color is so pale yellow that one might check to make sure one has not already drank it once already, and eww on that.
Reminds me of a fizzy powder, which they prolly don’t even sell in the candy aisle anymore these days, i don’t go down that aisle lately. It’s got carbonation, and there’s something that tastes like beer, but it isn’t really beer. Come to mention it, looks like the once-proud brand “Michelob” is only a light beer anymore. There used to be Michelob, and even a Mich Dark which was the best domestic beer in the pre-Sam Adams days. Then again, back in those days, even Bud still used barley instead of rice.
No idea what Mich Ultra uses, but they don’t use a lot of it. Only 95 calories per beer, with a measly 2.6 grams of carbohydrates, so clearly (as clear as this beer), there’s barely any fermentation going on. Still manages to be a respectable 4.2% alk, and that is a complete mystery to me. Must be magic of some kind. Well, the industrial beverage type of magic, which is just below throwing salt over your shoulder on the magic spectrum.
Michelob’s Ultra light beer, the other can style
So it’s not real beer, and it’s not good beer, but it does fill its purpose, and i’ll tell you why that matters. A report came out in July of 2016, a roundup of results for testing several craft beers for nutrition. And the calorie counts were startling. One result, from a crafty “double imperial chocolate stout” was a threatening 320 calories per 12-oz bottle. Oooof, a real shot to the gut.
Duh, a double stout is going to be sky high. It’s like pretending to be shocked that a choco-chip chocolate muffin with a rock sugar top drizzled by caramel sauce has as many calories as a Wendy’s triple cheeseburger. Duh, d00d. But the roundup of the rest was also enlightening. Real beer, it seems, is really heavy on the cals, in lock-step with being heavy on the yum taste.
So if you don’t want to be carrying last night’s sixpack around on top of your personal sixpack for a full week, you gotta pace your intakes. For regular drinking while vegging to the netflix, you just can’t do it imperial style. And that’s why something like Mich Ultra is useful. Personally, in a pint glass i’ll put 12 oz of this and a few oz of Yeungling Black & Tan to juice the taste.
The point is, with most light beers you HAVE to add something to make it drinkable. With this, you don’t. It’s not very good beer, but it’s not horrifying either. Rating, on its own: 2.8 but when juiced-up to make a blend which is tasty, the usefulness of Mich Ultra is far higher than a 2.8 rating would suggest.
Now the fourth and final Kona beer to try. A 5.8% alk pale ale, the label says it has a coppery color, though i’d call it more dark yellow than coppery. They still win for great bottles, it’s just that whatever’s inside them is, to be charitable, less than awesome. This one’s probably the best of the four, at least in this one the distasteful additive to Kona beers is masked better by a fuller beer body.
But it’s still there. That bitter ingredient that tastes like rat poison, a much different bitter than normal beer-flavor bitterness. They’re adding something to all the Kona beers, assumedly to make them stand out in the crowd, but whatever it is, it tastes terrible. Someone at Kona made a bad decision, and a side effect of that bad decision is having their beer made in Memphis, Tennessee while the label talks about catching waves and watching awesome volcanoes.
Where, exactly, does one surf in Memphis? How many volcanoes are an hour’s drive from Tennessee? My last Kona beer to taste and review, and definitely my last Kona beer to ever taste at all. Maybe beer brewed in their home shop on Hawai’i is better, but the foul thing they’ve got licensees making in their name in New Hampshire, Tennessee, Washington and Oregon is just an embarrassment.
Rating for this one is 2.9 and i advise every person to avoid all Kona Brewing beers.
Another swing and a miss from Kona. Not bat-piss, but again there’s that unexplained un-beer-ish bitterness. There’s something going into Kona beers as a flavoring additive which is inconsistent with beer. Whatever, i’ll never buy a Kona beer again. In the meanwhile, light body and muddled hops in this 6% alk IPA, it would rate a 5-something, if it wasn’t for that distasteful additive, whatever it is. As it stands, this can only be rated at 2.8 for a disastrous choice of unnatural flavoring.
On the other hand, the bottles and labels are just gorgeous, and i chose this one as a keeper, now and forever proudly displayed on a perch atop my plates cupboard, right between a Sapporo Reserve can and a Fiedler’s Bock Im Stein earthenware swingtop.
Better than the terrifyingly poor Longboard Lager, the golden ale offering from Kona is not as bad, a very light brew at a light 4.4% alk, and light in color. Tart hops and the thin body make this a good one for a Summer day, and that’s every day in Hawai’i. There’s a little bitterness on the backend, for god knows what reason, but it’s not beer bitterness, it’s like contamination bitterness.
It can’t be a mistake, all four of the Kona beers in the sampler 12 have this same nasty chemical taste to them. Have to assume that they’re adding something to the beer to give it some sort of “stand out” taste to set Kona apart from a crowded field of new beers, but whatever that additive is, it does not belong in beer.
This preparation rates at 2.7 but i can’t recommend it for anyone to drink.
Not much to it. Light for a lager, a savory taste, slightly spicy, a hint of sweetness. Decent beer, but not much to write home about. This one is my first taste of a Kona beer, and though they win an award for very nice bottles, the label makes me suspicious. It lists 5 towns where they brew this beer, 4 of them not in Hawai’i, so we don’t know if this qualifies as a craft beer or if it’s one of those zombie brews which was bought out by a major player, only to be simplified, bastardized, and mass produced by industrial drones in a commercial food production environment.
Can’t say i recommend this one, and not just because of the suspicious label. Mostly, this reminds me of the weak lagers prevalent in the 1980s. Almost a perfumy taste, like licking the wrong kind of toad. Can’t give this more than a 2.2 rating, for confusing natural sweetness with an incomplete fermentation.
