Red Hook Black Lobstah Lager

Trying new beers can sometimes be a detriment to my personality. Sometimes I’m just not happy sitting back and drinking another of the same beer. It’s a quirk in my makeup that’s both extremely frustrating and incredibly fulfilling. A lot of customers at the store scoff at the idea of drinking a beer with flowers in them like Dieu du Ciel Rosee D'Hibiscus, or the briny but smooth Marooned on Hog Island by 21^st Amendment, made with fresh oyster shells. But me, I loved them both, and even when I have a beer that doesn’t hit the mark with wacky ingredients, I’m happier to have loved and lost than to have never drank at all.

That leads to the newest beer that’s peaked my interest, Red Hook’s 6^th beer in their Backyard series for the New England Market, Black Lobstah Lager. Lame Boston accent joke aside, this beer is black as night and has red crustacean blood running through its veins. The beer pours a purely black hole of a beer, with little to no head off the top. I was expecting more brine in this beer, but it fell short of the lobster flavor. Tastes like the roasted malts you’d find in most stouts, but a much thinner feel while drinking, making it a nice sipper on a cool summer evening that’s surprisingly easy to drink and finished nice and clean. This beer just didn’t live up to what I was hoping for, but if you packaged it as a nice drinkable Cascadian it’d probably be a pretty nice beer.