In my two years of writing beer reviews for Second Supper, I’ve never mentioned a single beverage from Iowa. This isn’t due to any particular cultural bias toward our neighbors to the southwest, it’s more of a legal clause. Iowa, you see, has some of the most restrictive beer laws in the United States. Down there, any malted beverage with more than 5 percent alcohol by volume is considered a “liquor,” subject to a 25 percent excise tax and only sold at special government-run shops. If your beverage of choice is Miller Lite this may not be such an inconvenience, but the serious Iowa beer drinker shops at a restricted marketplace and its brewers are handcuffed when it comes to experimenting with style. For those reasons (plus the bevy of good brewskis in Wisco), I don’t believe I’d ever even seen an Iowa beer until I found this six pack at the Holmen Meat Locker this week. It’s a shame what those Iowans have to put up with.
Pouring a pale copper color that was light-to-translucent, I would have been hard-pressed to guess this was a brown ale. Still, the body was hazy, and the head bubbled up almost three fingers high on active carbonation. The aroma is faint, sweet but not especially appealing. It comes heavy on the malts with a bit of caramel and yeast, and something in there might smell like metal or old beef. The Brown Ale is neither nutty nor earthy like most decent beers of the style, and I’m curious if the batch was mislabeled or neutered in the brewery.
The first sip tastes watery, which is never a good sign. It turns sweet in the middle of the tongue then loses a battle to overcarbonation before resurfacing with an odd aftertaste of phenols and weak coffee. The mouthfeel is thin and annoyingly bubbly. It’s drinkable in the sense you can drink a lot of it — and one would probably have to if he felt like copping a buzz — but the alcohol content isn’t even listed on the bottle or the Web site. Perhaps those polite Iowans have just stopped asking.


— Adam Bissen