Green’s Discovery Amber Ale

Posted: February 17th, 2008 | Author: Stacy | Filed under: Beer Reviews, Craft Brew, Gluten-free, What's that in your fridge? | No Comments »

I was super excited to find that Green’s makes three styles of gluten-free beer. So far, gluten-free beer hasn’t been about a “style” so much as lack of gluten and quasi-beerness.

On pouring, Discovery is certainly amber colored, if a bit cloudy. The head is more akin to a foamy soda than a regular beer. Once again, the acrid bitterness of sorghum is present on first taste, though the aroma is very convincingly like a malt amber. It’s carbonated more like a Coke, with large bubbles that are a little overpowering and cover the flavor of the beer. As Kathy put it, “It’s like a Belgian beer soda.”

It paired fairly well with psuedo-Thai curry for dinner, though there’s something in the finish that isn’t quite right. It’s not as smooth and creamy as a malt beer; more rough and tangy like a tonic water without any lime. There’s clearly something about the addition of sorghum that adds a strange taste to the beer. I wonder if there’s a different way to get the proteins in the beer without using sorghum at all… They use millet, rice, and buckwheat in addition, so the millet could also be to blame for strange flavors.

Green’s is a bit expensive for regular consumption and I don’t think I’ll bother with Discovery again. I’m hopeful that their dubbel and tripel are more promising!

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