December 14 - Boulevard Brewing Company Snow and Tell

We're over halfway through the month and it's only the second installment of Winter Warmer Wednesday.  If you're new here, each Wednesday, I try and review something winter-themed like the winter warmer style.  Tonight, we're taking a closer look at Snow and Tell from Boulevard Brewing out of Kansas City, Missouri.  A buddy of mine, via Twitter one day, recommended I try their Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale.  I didn't get the chance to do so until my wife ran in the Boston Marathon last past year in April.  While feeding our faces at a local seafood joint, I thoroughly enjoyed it!  

Solid advice in
Boston!

Shameful that we can't get any of this stuff back home...until recently!  Yet again, my local bottle shop came through and started carrying some of their stuff.  I have another Boulevard brew waiting in the fridge for later this month, Dark Truth Stout.

This particular beer, my wife found at one of our local grocery stores and made a 6 pack for me for absolutely no good reason.  I'm a sucker for a cool label, if I haven't told you before and I guess she was too since this was pretty unique!

So, as you can see, we have here an Oak Aged Scotch Ale.  The scotch ale style/wee heavy isn't something that I know a ton about, but I am a fan of Old Chub from Oskar Blues.  I dig the malty profile of the ones that I've had and I'm intrigued to see how the oak will mingle with the scotch ale.  

The color of this beer was a pretty clean looking deep caramel brown that had a very creamy tannish-white head to it that was retained throughout.  The aroma was definitely sweet caramel malt along with some toasted bread and just a touch of smokiness, I assume from the oak.

I was excited to get down to business here since the label talks about this being a "complex beer perfectly suited for the season."  There was some malt here, but not a huge one like I expected.  The beer is only 6.3%, which comes in just at the lower range of the style.  It was a malt forward sip that had a mild hop bitterness that was almost non-existent.  Again, there was just a slight hint of smoke on the very back end of the beer.  

Swing and a miss...

Honestly, I was expecting more, even from a low ABV scotch ale.  There wasn't complexity here for me and to be honest there wasn't a whole lot of flavor to write home about.  I did have a friend on Untappd rate this earlier last week and it didn't receive a stellar rating from him.  The rest of the community rated it a 3.592/5.  I'm going to go with a 3 out of 5 here.  It's drinkable enough and light enough in ABV to have a few, but there's no way I'd seek this out and purchase more than one at a time.  Honestly, probably won't even do that again, unfortunately.