Technically, the bottle reads Widmer Brothers Brrr Seasonal Ale. It obviously comes to us from Widmer Brothers Brewing, which is located up in Portland, Oregon – one of the two most highly regarded craft beer states in the U.S. (along with Colorado). We used a pint glass for our review of this 12 oz bottle of free beery goodness. The IBU comes in at 50, the ABV comes in at 7.2% and our starting beer temperature was 55.4 F.

Our pour yielded a good sized 2″ frothy off-white head that left a good amount of lacing as it dissipated slowly. A really good start! There is a soft amount of carbonation in the sparkling clear perfectly amber colored body. It looks well crafted.

Giving the beer the old sniffy sniff test got us a good amount of citrus, including grapefruit and pine. We also got a note of spices and a possible aroma of toasted malts. That’s it. It almost smells like a cleaner you’d find under your sink to mop the floor (some people are into that!). The lack of aroma complexity follows suit in the taste – grapefruit, pine and orange are the predominant tastes we pulled out. A little disappointing to be honest – our heart was set on a good spicy, caramely winter warmer of a beer and it didn’t really deliver on that front.

The initial flavor notes are a light sweet and heavy bitter that stay the course through the finish but add a slight metallic taste. The finish hangs in there for a good amount of time and the mouthfeel is dry. The tongue hit is in the back, where all your bittererers are. There’s a fair amount of body lacing and on the patented BeerFathers malt to hop scale it comes in 3 clicks to the right of balanced on the hoppy side. One click away from as hoppy as you can get.

For our bottom line notes we got a no to drinkable, no to repeatable, no to harmony, no to memorable, no to wow factor and no to buy again. The only thing we could say was there was “some” balance in the taste with the elements, but not much. We even put a no to “receive for free again.”

Of course you know The BeerFathers are not hopheads – we love the malts. This beer comes in almost IPA-like, but not in a good way for us. We can get into some hoppy beers and have rated some IPAs as high as a 7/10 on this very site (see Dogfish Head, 90). But even those highly rated beers had some good malt backbone to balance out the hop shock. This one just doesn’t do that. The press release states that it “embodies the notable ‘Pacific Northwest style’ citrus hop aromas and flavor.” Makes us somewhat glad we don’t live in the Pacific Northwest, though we’d love to visit someday. As long as our hotel isn’t on a cascade hop farm, we should be in good shape.

If you’re a hophead get it and try it – you’ll probably love it. Don’t expect complexity though because it’s just not there. It does have a good alcohol content at 7.2% – what we’d call the low side of high, so there’s that going for it. The press release also states that “caramel and chocolate malts provide flavor complexity” but we just couldn’t find them. If they had ramped those up a good bit it could have balanced it out and made an ultimately much more interesting and enjoyable beer for us.

It would probably be much better with food, perhaps some holiday meals with lots of ham and various other accoutrement. By itself, which is how we rate all our beers, it’s just too hoppy for The BeerFathers. We think maybe a beer needs vowels to be good and the Brrr falls just a little short there.

Father Beer Love Review (March 2, 2008):

Let me start out by saying I love me some Weissbier. I bought this in Lees Summit in October last year and kept it in my stash not cellared for 5 months before I cooled it. A cellar in La. would be a pool under your house. The price tag on the bottle had a code on top of 08070216 which tells me that is was put on the shelf on Aug.2 2007 (39 years of retail taught me something). It was at least 6 months old not counting the transportation time. The label said to store it below 50 F. which wasn’t done in the store either. I’m kind of like Scrooge McDuck in like I like to store things and just have them, I can’t swim in them like he does with his money. This does not work with beer in general and as I have found out wheats in particular.

I’ll go ahead since I filled out the form and feel like must do something to account for my time. These 2 months off have really changed me (when’s Scrubs, Dr. Phil and Oprah on?) .

Beer temp. 46.7F-8.3C it poured a clear gold with a large 2 in. white head. On the 2nd pour [since I had a .5L bottle and a 12 oz. pils. glass] it became muddy, should have agitated it first. The head was fizzy and dissipated quickly with virtually no lacing. Aromas were biscuit, honey, grain, grapefruit, grass, soap and banana. Initial taste was light sweet and tart. The taste were grapefruit, lemon and something I couldn’t place but it wasn’t a good one, maybe it was the soap [it's been a long tame since mom put soap in my mouth for bad words and have bee trying to forget the taste ever since]. I look for balance and harmony of the elements but how can you balance and harmonize BAD? I poured out the last and kept the bottle which looks like the .5L Grolsch fancy bottle you see in the cooler with the wire and the ceramic stopper. I feel that this is probably a much better beer and most of the fault was mine but I can only report what I tasted. Since we usually only give zeros to beers we pour out I gave it a giant bonus point for the bottle.

Son Beer Love Review (March 5, 2008):

This one was an intriguing beer. I actually drank and rated mine before dad did his, he just posted his to the site first. It was interesting to note some of the similarities from his review and somewhat assuring that I was able to pull out some of the same things and that my palate wasn’t just off.

First things first – it’s got a great Grolsch style bottle with the built-in flip-top. I love that. I also like the name Moosbacher. That concludes the list of things I really like.

It’s brewed by Private Landbrauerei Scheuerer over in Germany and the 500 mL bottle’s contents are settled at 5% ABV. I served it up in a pint glass. Unlike Dad, I’ve kept this refrigerated the whole time I stored it, so my review is quite a bit different from his.

The pour was impressive – a huge 3 inch head, slightly off-white and a bit frothy looking dissipated slowly, though it left no lacing. Lot of bubbles in the head were a result of the fizzy carbonation and a sparkling body golden yellow in color.

The smells were citrus, wheat, yeast, herb, slight lemon, grass and bubble gum. Something is off in the aroma though I can’t place my finger on it at first – it’s soap.

The taste is hoppy and somewhat soapy, though it gets a bit better as it warms and finally gets a slight banana edge to it. It’s not a great balance at all. Initial flavor was moderately bitter, which stayed the same throughout the finish. There is some lacing on the glass as you drink it. The aftertaste is flat though and doesn’t last long. The mouthfeel is a bit dry and though it’s drinkable (my list of beers that aren’t drinkable is a short one), I wouldn’t want another one.

This is not a top hefe – it’s unbalanced and flat. It makes me wonder if the beer is off? Either way it’s not a great example of the style. I wouldn’t do it again with all the other great hefes on the market today.

This was the last of a six pack (thank god). As I bid a fond farewell I’ll say this: buy it at your own risk, drink it if you must or better yet serve it to people you don’t care for very much.

The pour is hazy/cloudy and amber/orange in color. It has a nice smell – citrusy – and reminds me a bit of a Hoegaarden. I’m thinking good things about this beer. The first sip leaves you a bit startled – not quite what you expected. The salt taste and aftertaste is a little strong. Another sip, a little too strong. One more sip – something just isn’t right here – I can’t stop thinking of the phrase “saltwater brine” for some reason. It’s like I’m drinking the very thing we use to make pork tenderloins so juicy. That’s not good. It’s a little sour too, yet weak. Hops aren’t noticeable, if there are any. I finish the glass like a good German soldier, but only after a few hours and a little bit of talking myself into it. I do not recommend this beer one bit.