100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #13
I picked this one up purely for the novelty value. I’d never heard of any sort of Lithuanian beer, and this one’s got a half–angry blonde chick/half-dog abomination on the label, so hey, why not. The half-liter bottle proudly proclaims its alcohol content (8.2% ABV), has a little blurb on the back about the history of the brewery—a blurb that’s missing just enough articles to make it sound a little bit off—and on the front, beneath the werewolf, is a warning of sorts, “You must be sure you wanna taste it.”
Well, I guess they got me on that one. This beer is kind of not so good. It looks ok at first, a deep orange with a short, off-white head, but the smell is not nice. It’s a little malty, a little boozy, and a little something else that’s hard to pin down, like roses and benzene. The taste is simple and cheap. It starts with with a sickly, caramel sweetness that fades into a musty bitterness, and that’s about it. I ended up pouring most of it out.
I should have known better. The werewolf would seem to imply that this is a beer that’ll you transform into something angry and hairy, or that’ll it’ll mess you up like a werewolf might, but what threw me off was another bottle from the same brewery next to this one at the store: Lobster Lover’s, which advertised an ABV of 9 and some. Eating lobster doesn’t sound very threatening, so I thought maybe this is just some inscrutible Lithuanian heritage thing. No, I think it’s just supposed to mess you up. I recommend you shy away from European compactness and grab a forty instead.