Miasmatic Review

Harp

I made a mistake this week. It wasn’t until late last night that I realized that I it was Wednesday. That meant I had a beer review to do. It was too late for my deadline yesterday, so I’m doing it a day late. Hope no one is too upset, especially since I ended up not doing one last week. This is the last review for the month of March, which means the last Irish beer for a while, this week I did Harp Lager by the Guinness Brewing Company.

We have a standard 12 oz brown bottle with a front, back and neck label. The labels aren’t all that fancy, a cream oval on a dark blue background. It has the name of the beer and the picture of a harp on it. Along the bottom it tells you that it’s “From the brewers of Guinness.”

When poured into a standard pint glass, the beer itself has a nice golden to straw yellow coloring. It’s clear with no distortion or cloudiness at all. It formed a nice half-inch head that dissipated very slowly. As the head disappeared, it left a good, thick lacing on the side of the glass.

The smell was kind of week. There was a nice floral scent of hops with a touch of malts to it. There was a citrus undertone like that of lemon that helped enhance the hops and malts. The flavor was that of malted grains with just a touch of hop bitterness. The flavor wasn’t very strong. I’m even going to say it was a little on the week side.

This is a light bodied beer. There is a nice level of carbonation that makes it easy to drink. It’s very crisp and refreshing.

This is not a bad beer; I’ve had it before and was never overly impressed with it. Since it is an import, I’m not sure it’s actually worth the price for the quality. I’m going to give Harp 5 out of ten.