Welcome back to Broskies on Brewskies, your local craft beer column done by your favourite fourth years Tristan and Donovan. I mean, we think we’re your favourite fourth years, but that’s totally up to you. Anyways, we’ve been off-and-on roommates since first year and friends since way before then. We’ve been tasting and reviewing craft beers for the Iron Warrior since 2B, and have (hopefully) entered our final “season”. 4B, am I right?
For our inaugural issue this term we decided to review a mystery beer pack from the Nicklebrook Brewing Company. The Burlington based brewing company recently had a promotion where they packaged four new craft beers together in a mystery pack without labelling which beer is which. The four beers were a Sour, a Session IPA, a New England Style IPA, and a Stout. Nicklebrook was looking for their next star beer, and was hoping to get feedback on everyone’s favourite beers from the mystery pack.
Our first beer was definitely the sour. It was mostly just sour all the way through and had neither of us really enjoyed it very much. It had a light feel to it and felt like it was meant to be an easy drinking summer beer. It missed on almost every point, and we ended up giving it a 2/5.
We think the next beer up was one of the IPAs, probably the Session IPA. This beer was SIGNIFICANTLY better than the sour. It was citrusy and fruity, with a nice feel. The beer had a perfect amount of bitterness to it, which complimented all of the other flavours. There was however a fair amount of sediment in the beer. We didn’t overly mind this, but would have been more accepting of it if we were at the brewery. We gave this beer 4/5.
The third beer was definitely the other IPA. We thought that this beer was even better than the last one. This beer had an excellent malty flavour to compliment its hoppy bitterness. It had a full flavour and honestly just built on what made the previous beer excellent. This beer also had a bit of sediment in the bottom. Hopefully they figure out the sediment issues when they scale this one up, as it was our favourite and what we ended up voting on. We ended up giving this beer 4.5/5.
The last beer was the Stout. I’m a big fan of the Stouts, but Tristan isn’t. The stout had a weird aftertaste to start with, but I got used to this as I got through it and Tristan didn’t. There was the classic stout creaminess with an undertone of chocolate, but was uncharacteristically bitter for a Stout. We eventually settled on 2.5/5 for this bad boy.
Overall I think this was a great idea for a brewery. It lets them try new ideas, and see what works and what doesn’t.
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