Miasmatic Review

Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy

It’s time for our first extra-curricular beer review! Tonight we have Summer Shandy (Not shanty as the ladies like to yell at us drunks when we miss pronounced it at the Beer Tasting!) by the Leinenkugel’s brewery in Chippewa Falls, WI. This beer(?) was provided by blogspawn Bruce. Why am I questioning calling this a beer? Because it is “Beer with natural lemonade flavor”. Yea, it’s beer and lemonade.

We have the standard 12 oz brown bottle. There is a yellow label on it that has the standard Leinie’s design. You can see a lake with a boat on it in the background. There are lemons in the upper right corner and on the bottom ribbon there is a lemon flanked by wheat stalks.

It pours a murky pale yellow color. It’s cloudy enough you can’t see through it, yet it still lets light pass through. There was a half-inch head on it that faded to a ring around the edge of the glass. There is some lacing, but not very much.

The smell is a combination of overly sweet lemonade and cereal grains. Mostly what you smell is the lemonade. Fortunately the taste isn’t as strong as the smell; in fact the taste is rather weak. What you do taste is lemonade and cereal. It’s almost like someone spilled lemonade in a wheat beer.

It’s hard to describe the body of the beer, because it is a mix, but I’d say its light bodied. For the body it has, the carbonation was a bit on the heavy side.

Overall this is going in my “not a beer” category. In and of itself it’s not horribly bad; I’ve had much worse. Yet at the same time if you are looking for a beer with beer flavor, you are not going to be pleasantly surprised by this.

As a beer I’m giving this a 2.5 out of 10. As an alcoholic beverage I give it a 4 out of 10. At the Beer Tasting I rated it a 3 out of 10.

By the way, Bruce... the next beer you donate better be at least a 5 you son of a beaotch! out of the seven beers you've donated you're average score is a 3! You're damn lucky I'm not giving you credit for the Chelada!