Pour is a deep brown with a small head. Aroma is very malty and strong. flavor is malt with a very sweet spice to it. Aftertaste is carmel and a nice dose of fruitness. I like it!

Pours a brownish yellow out of the bottle. Aroma is of a fruity and malty mix. Flavor is of course cranberry with some notes of some malts. Very sweet,tart and dry. Not a bad attempt. Came in a winter classic pack.

I feel ashamed to have taken this long to get around to rating this beer. I have beer drinking this beer for years. Not regularly perhaps, but frequently enough that I should have gotten around to this earlier. Often this beer remains the best beer I can find when dining at the national chain restaurants. Sampled from a 12 oz brown bottle this old friend pours a copper color with a small white head. The aroma is sour and rather hoppy. The flavor is light sour malt with a hint of nut and a very nice hop finish. The finish is also mildly malty and bitter. The hops linger. I think sometimes that we have all had this one so many times that we tend to rate it a little lower than it should be. Granted there are far better beers in this world. But this remains a good beer, and for many of us a gateway into a finer beer universe.

I got this one in the holiday pack. Next to the Fezziwig which is the real gem of the collection - this beer comes in a close second. Sampled from a 12 oz brown bottle - with a pretty label I might add - this beer poured a black color with a small brown head. The aroma was rather pleasant and contains sour malt, tangy fruit and chocolate elements. The mouthfeel was reasonably thick. The flavor was very malty, loaded with chocolate and had a hint of fruit. There was a strong hop finish in the finish. This is a rather good porter. Not one of the best, but certainly a strong contestant in the second tier. I would happily purchase a case of this one.

Well first of all this is not a lambic. Let us all be perfectly clear on that. Not so long ago I would have been ignorant of the difference, and no doubt when the Boston Beer Company first started brewing this the people who could have called them on this injustice were no doubt few and far between. As American beer sensibilities have grown, this brewer really should step up and rename the beer but that is really another subject all together. Let us actually get to the task of rating the beer. Firstly put aside all notion of this being a lambic - as already discussed. Next look at presentation. A pretty label - if rather typical for the brewer, and at least a brown bottle. The pour is orange-amber color with a medium sized yellow head. Pretty enough but not exactly noteworthy in appearance. The aroma is light and vaguely fruity - though I would have been hard pressed to guess cranberry on nose alone. The flavor is largely lacking in any real malt flavor or body. There is a sour fruit flavor that is distinctly cranberry but this beer has little else to challenge the palate. In passing the beer around the reviews ran from "God awful" to "Not too shabby." In essence what we get is a mild, fruit flavored beer that appeals to that type of drinker and disappoints those who prefer more body and malt.

Sampled from a 12 oz brown bottle this beer poured a dark chestnut color with a medium sized tan head. The aroma was sour malt and spice - mostly cinnamon. The flavor had a nice malt presence with elements of caramel, maple syrup, fruit and spice. There was a vague, almost Belgian style flavor set to this beer. I found it rather enjoyable and only wish I could get it by itself and not just in their holiday mix case.

In my previous rating I had scored this as very much the definition of boring american wheat. Clean and bland, with a score of 2.7. A recent tasting of the new batch leads me to believe the recipe may be different. Poured a fairly cloudy golden color, foaming head a bit small for style. Aroma clean, a bit of citrus, but mainly spicy and herbal noble hops! This beer is quite hoppy. The flavor seems dominated by spicy flavoring hops, and there’s a long bitter finish, whereas I would expect a hefe to finish quickly with little hop aftertaste. I’m not trying to rate to style here, rather I just find this slightly citrusy, slightly spicy wheat beer somewhat nice and drinkable but less enjoyable than it could be because the hops really do seem to clash.

It looks like an oatmeal stout, smells like an oatmeal stout, and tastes like an oatmeal stout. Flavors of coffee and chocolate. biter. Decent.