Bought on a Thursday, opened on the Friday, a 473ml can into a willi becher. Light amber with a slight chill haze, the head dense and slow-moving.
Left Field Brewery have built this on pale / vienna with Saaz / Cascade in the kettle. 4.4%, 34 IBU: unremarkable numbers on paper, and the beer is better for it.
The palate is where it earns the score. The Saaz / Cascade bitterness arrives early and holds through a finish dry enough to pull you straight back to the glass. Nothing sags in the middle, which is the failure mode for most pale ales.
The whole point of a beer at 4.4% is the second and third glass, and this survives both. There is no cloying edge, no fatigue in the finish, and the hop character stays legible right through. That is harder to achieve than a big beer, and it gets a fraction of the credit.
Getting flavour into a beer this light is the hardest trick in brewing, and there is nowhere to hide when it fails. This does not fail.
This is a perfectly competent beer with nothing much to say for itself, and there is no shame in that. At $4.10 / 473ml it is a reasonable trade. Whether you would choose it over the two better things beside it on the shelf is a different question.
Bought at Left Field Taproom (in stock at the time of writing). Nothing clever required. Cold, tall glass, done.
Buy it if it is in front of you and nothing better is. That is the whole review.
