Hey, I could have been nice towards Fort Garry, they make some amazing beers. Their Portage & Main IPA is the best Manitoban IPA and now it's returning in cans! Their brewmaster series beers by my head brewer pal Matt has done an amaaaazing job with going from lagers, pilsners, lime lagers and even more pilsners to branching out to stouts, IPAs and porters among other styles of beers that they're continuously working on... one thing bugs me.. and that is Stone Cold Draft. If you grew up in Manitoba during the late 90s or early 2000s like I did, you grew up around Fort Garry's Stone Cold Draft for the soul fact that it was cheeeeeeeap! Us farm boys didn't give a rats ass what a beer would taste like, if it tasted like beer in Oscar Leroy's shoe, we'd still drink it!
Fort Garry's Stone Cold Draft Lager is your typical prairie lager. While it isn't your malt liquor that comes in 40oz jugs like some beers, this is a pale lager at 6.2% and in a big-assed 2L pop bottle. Pouring the BIG ASSED BROWN JUG into a glass was a bit of pain because you have to pour it a certain way, if you pour it like you're pouring some Coke, it's going to end up all foam and you're gonna have a bad time! Stone Cold pours a clear yellow-as-straw goldenness, just what you would expect in a lager, it's just as fizzy as a bottle of Coke too! The fizz diminishes almost immediately, leaving 0 foam, and lots of bubbles coming up from the micro carbonation.
For aroma, I get the smell of old plastic bottle, just like if you were buying a 2L at the local Co-Op that you're not sure has been sitting out for how long... that smell. Plasticy. Plastic isn't the only eau-de-resistence ici, there's also notes of corn, just like the corn you get in a Swanson's TV Dinner meal. Somewhat grainy, like the one time I had to clean out the grain bin right as the 1997 NHL Allstar game was taking place, I was missing the entire game cleaning bins and getting rid of dead mouse carcasses, but Stone Cold > Mouse carcasses!
Taste wise, I'd say, this is delicious.. oh hellllll no. Well, that was rude, wasn't it? Well, aside from the flavour of plastic leaking in, this is better than Bud Light and Coors Light, would I prefer Bud Light Lime or Stone Cold plastic? Does it really matter? It's a malty, corny, leaves a bad metallic aftertaste on the palate. This tastes like corn juice mixed with some corn syrup and a bit of barley in there somewhere.. like as if my dad randomly dropped by some barley and shrugged off and went away with his quad.
The moral of the story is: if the bottle is in plastic, it no good! But at $8.50 including taxes and deposit for a god damned 2 litre of alcoholic malted barley-corn water, that's cheaper than sending $11 to Molbatts for some Keystone Why? right? But wait, it shares a name with Stone Cold Steve Austin. So Fort Garry has that going for them, right?!
Oh and top it off, not my finest moments, I have been known to down a bottle of Fort Garry Stone Cold like it was nothing, and uh..
6.2% ABV in a 2L plastic bottle. Costs $8.50 after taxes at your local vendor in just about anywhere in Manitoba. Not sure the IBUs if you're looking for that, but I'd give that a 5/100.
**Just a reminder - BeerCrank.ca does NOT support/condone binge drinking. Do not drink & drive: get a designated driver, use public transit or get a cab, or just drink in your own apartment alone like a loser, like how I usually do**
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