Archive for the 'Surly' category
Surly Coffee Bender
Second up on our week o’ cans is this selection from Surly. Now, Surly is a very Minnesota beer. In my couple of weeks in Minneapolis, I’m seeing this stuff everywhere. It’s the kind of local beer that, even though it’s a good craft brew, it will find it’s place amongst the taps of even your less-discriminating pubs. This is seemingly because it is so well-entrenched in the hearts of the Minnesotans that even your Bud Light swilling locals will pick up a pint. It’s good to have a beer that people associate with home, and Surly seems to be that beer here (along with Grain Belt, a substantially lower quality cousin).
This particular beer, the Coffee Bender is *not* anything I’ve seen on tap around Minneapolis, but I’m intrigued. My impression is that this is coffee blended with beer, as opposed to coffee brewed with beer. This, in itself, kinda turns me off. However, Surly speaks of their cold brewing technique for the beer – it’s a technique I’ve seen used to good results in iced coffees, so I’m curious to see what this does with a beer.
The pour of the Bender is very dark, but not at all as viscous as I expected. Rather, it pours quite lightly, churning up a thin caramel head that quickly dissipates. In the nose, this may as well be a bag of coffee beans. The aroma is intense and rich and could stand along any of the other better-known coffee brews out there. The initial flavor of the beer is lightly sweet, but doesn’t smack you in the face. However, it quickly grows to a substantial coffee flavor. Compared to most coffee beers (which are, admittedly, mostly stouts), the mouthfeel of the Bender is flaccid. It’s a light beer, it flits through the mouth easily, and it doesn’t have a tendency to stick to the tongue. That being said, this packs quite a lot of coffee flavor into a rather light ale. This is chock full of coffee flavor with just the slightest malty flavor to let you know there is beer involved. In the coffee beer market, most brewers are trying to do the biggest, most syrupy beer they an pull off. What Surly has pulled off is creating a coffee beer that is sessionable. It’s appealing, light, and refreshing – and it tastes like coffee. I think there are a lot of people out there who would really enjoy this, and I’m one of them. It might be easy for some to chalk this up as a lesser cousin to the Terrapin Wake-N-Bake Stouts or the Founder’s Kentucky Breakfast Stout. However, I think those folks would miss the goal of the Coffee Bender – actually making a beer that wouldn’t be out of place early in the morning (not that we condone that or anything)…
