100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #38
I bought a mixed case of Magic Hat beers, so expect a couple reviews of those in the days ahead. I started off with Wacko, which I knew nothing about in advance. Magic Hat isn’t really known for telling you a lot about their beers on the bottle. You stand very little chance of knowing what style one of their beers might be. You’ll be lucky if it’s even got a style at all. They take a very lax attitude towards crazy things like style, which can be fine sometimes. On the other hand as David Shea mentioned weeks and weeks ago, they also tend to focus on the hype more than the beer sometimes. So with that said, here we go.
When you pour a beer into your glass, you have a certain expectation. If the bottle tells you it’s a stout or a porter, you expect something brown or black. If it calls itself a hefeweizen, you expect something very lightly colored. If it’s a red ale, you expect something on the red side. Having no style information on the bottle, I didn’t know what to expect from Wacko. Even if I had known, I wouldn’t have expected what I got. It pours a bright, BRIGHT, iridescent, unnatural red color with a pink head. It’s seriously the most ridiculous beer color I have ever seen. It also set up the expectation from Sarah for cherry soda.
Luckily, it does not taste like cherry soda. It tastes malty without being overly sweet, a little bit spicy (salty, even?) when swished around, and more sweet in the finish. It’s not a very heavy beer which is understandable since it’s supposed to be a summer beer. The taste fades fairly quickly, leaving you wondering exactly what that bright red stuff in your glass is doing there. So to recap… style? I’d have to say it’s just a spiced beer, probably based on some sort of simple pale ale. I would drink it again which is good because there’s at least three more in the fridge, but I’m going to be wondering what’s going on with it the entire time.