Hop City Barking Squirrel

Name: Barking Squirrel Lager
Style: Heller bock
ABV: 5.0%
Serving: 20oz shaker
Where: Pub Italia, Ottawa
Brewery: Hop City
Location: Brampton, ON, Canada
Weblink: Barking Squirrel Lager

So, another lager. How unlike me... is must be the time of year I guess. Anyway, this review is culled from a posting the I made at a beer rating site. Why am I repeating it here? Well, for completeness for one, but also as the other reviews I have read on said rating site seemed very skewed. I know that we all like to tell ourselves that we drink 'good' beer because we simply like it more, but there does seem to be a slightly classier than thou pretension in some quarters too. It seems that the harder a beer is to find and the smaller the brewery the more certain people seem to like the beer; the reverse is also true. So ok Hop City isn't really a microbrewer, being part of the considerably larger (and commercially-orientated) Moosehead concern, but I tend to take things as I find them. Moosehead also own 50% of Montreal's superb McAuslan Brewery, so they clearly know how to give their subsidiaries enough freedom to be distinctive. I've had plenty of crappy beer brewed by microbreweries and brewpubs, and some really classy offerings from big operations.

For a start, some have accused this beer of only pouring with a "thin, browny head"; that’s your barman’s fault. Go to a pub where they know how to pull pints and keep their lines clean. Every time I have been handed a pint of Barking Squirrel it has had 1-2cm of fine, light foam, sat jauntily atop a pleasingly deep orange/amber body, with moderate effervescence. While pretty hoppy for a dark lager, it isn’t a hop monster in the currently fashionable ilk. There is a burnt caramel/toffee sweetness here that is nicely balanced (balance being the keyword...) by a gently bittering, citrusy florality to the back of the mouth and in the aftertaste. However, this isn’t one of the trendy, mouth-puckeringly bitter, overhopped "macho" IPAs that are cropping up all over the place, and with a brewery name like this I think some people were expecting more. Hops are great. I’ve loved hops for many years, but just because that isn’t all you can taste doesn’t mean that it fails. In fact, its balance is a mark distinctly in its favour. Another dark mark seems to be that its appearance is goading people into believing that this is a bitter and are judging it in that context. Yes it is pretty approachable, possibly even commercial, for a (pseudo-)craft beer, and it may not be a world-beater, but levelling dull, repetitious, unthinking comments at it is far more "meh" than this perfectly good dark lager.