Ninkasi Spring Reign

Hello friends. It’s time, once again, for my Friday beer tasting notes. This has become a weekly feature here at samuelrutledge.com, and I’ve quite enjoyed it (not only because it’s an excuse to drink good beer!) I’m hopeful that I will shortly be able to announce new and exciting changes to the tasting notes section, but today is still a bit premature. Needless to say, this feature is soon to become more interesting and collaborative.

That said, let’s get to today’s review.

Tonight, I enjoyed a draught pour of the Ninkasi Brewery’s Spring Reign. I have to admit that I was not as focused or careful in this review as I have been in past weeks. The reason for this is that I spent my Friday afternoon and early evening at the Eugene Beer and Blog, which is a weekly event where blog people drink beer together and talk blog stuff. Several conversations of interest and import ensued, none of which is relevant to this post. In any event, I was conversing with others while trying to pay attention to my beer, which was rather a mistake. I enjoyed the beer, but didn’t pay it the attention it deserved.

My first impression of the spring release was that it looked fresh. After several months of enjoying dark beers, winter warmers, and beers designed for cold weather and heavy meals, I was excited to have a glass of beer that was straw colored with a lovely, tight, crisp white head. The head retained fairly well on the glass, and it kept it’s aesthetic for several minutes after I sat down. That said, it did dissipate before long and there was little lacing left on my glass. An aside here is that there was little lacing on any of the glasses around the table, which makes me wonder if the glassware at this establishment is actually clean. But I digress.

The aroma of the beer was green, fresh, grassy. Mostly hop and with very little malt on the nose. It smelled, appropriately, rather like spring. In keeping with the theme of offering footware metaphors at the aroma point of the notes, if the smell of this beer was a person it seems like it would be at home in Tevas or in Converse All Stars.

The first impression about the flavor is that it’s hoppier than I would expect from a spring seasonal. My general impression of spring beers is that they’re pretty boring, as a whole. This one is an exception. The hops add to a fresh, grassy, floral, herby kind of affect. The flavor is not one dimensional by any means, but it also isn’t terribly deep. The malt profile is simple and understated, leaving the hops to shine but not making any real effort to balance them. This leads to a crisp, dry, refreshing beer, but one that isn’t’ terribly interesting.

As far as mouthfeel is concerned, I’ll say that this is one area where I just wasn’t paying that much attention. Frankly, it felt like beer in my mouth. It wasn’t particularly watery, but it also wasn’t overly sticky. It wasn’t big, but it certainly wasn’t little. It was crisp. That’s what I keep coming back to; it was damned crisp. And that’s good.

This is the kind of beer you can drink for hours, for days. I could get a keg of this and just drink and play with power tools for a week. Two weeks, maybe, if I was stingy with my friends. This is a good beer for spring. It’s a hopeful beer, and a beer that seems to be a harbinger of change and better times to come. It’s approachable enough that even a seasoned Budweiser drinker could enjoy it, but has enough complexity to satisfy a terminal beer geek. The downside here is that the beer is a little boring, they have not done anything very gutsy. But this is a ‘your strength is your weakness’ situation, as the approachability and drinkability of the beer are directly related to the neutrality of it. Ninkasi, I think, has done it again. A damn good beer.