Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Ölvisholt Skjálfti

I'm going a bit off the beer map today with an Icelandic beer. It comes in a 500mL brown bottle with 5% alcohol/vol. It had a best-before date of 22 December 2013, so I think I'm in the clear. It even had an ingredients list: Icelandic water (yes, they actually mentioned that it was "Icelandic"), malted barley, wheat malt, hops, yeast. I was a bit surprised about the wheat malt. That can either be a good thing or a bad thing. Most likely, it will just give it a ludicrous head and make the flavour a bit more mellow (like a wheat beer).

When opened, there wasn't much aroma. I had to snort the bottle hard to smell anything. It smelled like your run-of-the-mill domestic. When poured, it formed the expected huge head but then died off fast. The aroma was corny (which was odd, since corn wasn't on the ingredients list). The beer had a dark yellow/light gold colour. There were a reasonable amount of tiny bubbles.

The first sip was mediocre. The flavour was fairly mellow, ever so slightly sweet. It tasted somewhere between a domestic and a wheat beer. The feel in the mouth was a bit sharp with the carbonation, but was not noticeable until swallowing. There was no significant amount of hops detectable. I very quickly got bored of the beer. If I was in Iceland, I'd drink it to blend in with the locals. But I would not go out of my way to buy this beer again.

No comments:

Post a Comment