Octoberfest 2007 has come and gone and we sampled many, many, different types of beers. There were so many good beers, I can’t even begin to attempt to pick out my favorite. However, there was one that stood out… unfortunately, it stood out in a bad way.

Butternuts Porkslap Pale Ale had one of the funkiest tastes I have ever tasted. First off, it is barely a pale ale, but I don’t know how to classify it other than a specialty ale.

Butternuts tells us…

it a new interpretation if the English Pale Ale with a hint of fresh ginger spices

balanced, not overly bitter, easy to drink and incredibly refreshing

it pours orange and crystal clear with a frothy white head

I don’t know what the taste was, but it was funky; a bad funk. Perhaps it was a bad batch. Mine did not pour clear and had a weak head of foam supporting the “bad batch” theory. I didn’t taste ginger, unless what I did taste was supposed to be a hint of ginger. It is unfortunate.

My local beverage center now has a mixed twelve pack Butternut beers on the shelf — but I doubt I’m going try it even if this was a bad batch; consistency is just as important as taste. It is a factor of quality. I stopped buying the Saratoga Lager for the same reason.

Leave it to marketing and a cheap price that got me to taste it in the first place, but once bitten, twice shy.