Trafalgar Oak Aged Rye

Name: Oak Aged Rye Premium Ale
Style: Bitter ale (Roggenbier)
ABV: 5.0%
Serving: 650ml bottle
Brewery: Trafalgar Ales & Meads
Location: Oakville, ON, Canada
Weblink: Trafalgar Ales & Meads

An off-the-cuff LCBO purchase, this one. A hefty bottle with a distinctive green label. I'll admit that I hadn't heard of the brewery, let alone the beer, before I picked this one up, but always willing to try something new I stuffed one into an already heaving basket. So...

The beer is very low in effervescence, and pours with almost no head despite fairly brutal treatment. The colour is a very pleasing, burnished copper, with a very slight sediment haze. The beer's nose has a promising blend of appley-citrus notes and a subdued caramel backbone, overlain by a rye-sour tang. At this point I'm hopeful. But... (you could see the 'but' coming there, couldn't you?) where'd that all go in the mouth? Ok, so there is dry florality, but that disappears pretty darn fast, and a softly lingering toasty vanilla (the oak, I assume) is all you are left with. All in all this is pretty disappointing and thin. The brewery was apparently set up in 1993, so you'd think that they would know how to put together a cracking beer with the combination of interesting grains and expensive oak aging, but frankly I've had more interesting homebrew than this. Drat.