Tuesday, March 12, 2013

A Year of Craft Beer, Vol. 72, OMission Lager by Widmer Bros.

This beer is in the Light Lager entry.  It is akin to something like Coors Light and I would have to say better.  This style is typically light in calories and flavor, well balanced with almost no maltiness or hoppiness.

This is a Gluten Free beer part of my Gluten Free Week celebration and it fairs well against it's counterparts in the real beer world even though the gluten has been flocculated out.
The bottle is great for homebrew use!  The label on these beers from the OMission line are rather boring and bland.

The beer pours a crystal clear golden straw color cold in the glass.  As you can see, it's humid in my apartment and condensation has formed on the glass and bottle.  Other reviews say the color is really pale, but for me it was a nice deep color.  There was almost no head and no retention of said head and absolutely no lacing.  I clean my glassware well, so...

There is almost no aroma.  What there is reminds me of grains and lemon with maybe a little yeast and the tiniest amount of skunk.  I suspect that if this warms up, those will become more pronounced.

The taste is so faint that it is hard to decifer, but I can tell you this, I am not tasting cheap adjuncts, I'm tasting malts which raises the quality better than the big beers.  It starts off mildly sweet like honey in water and as it moves across the tongue it just fades to maybe a dried grass kind of taste and a very mild hop dryness at the end.  This one is NOT easy to pick apart because it's so faint.

Mouthfeel and body are thin for sure.  Some sweetness well balanced with a tiny bit of bitter from the hops.  The finish, if there is one, might be slightly dry from the hops but this beer is so thin that it is tough to tell.  Carbonation in this beer is light to moderate and definitely on the light side of moderate.

Overall, this being a gluten free beer AND in the same class as light beers from the big boys, I am pretty happy with it!  I would choose this over many other light beers that I had and they have gluten still in them so I am going to have to give this a 4 out of 5 overall!  I would recommend this to someone drinking the big beers as an alternative any day.

Get out there, drink something else.  Life is too short to waste on crap beer!

-Wiss

No comments: