Birra Messina

Brewed by Heineken Italia
Style: Pale Lager
Milano, Italy

Bottled. Golden coloured. Quite clear. Dense offwhite head. Grassy and fruity aroma. Quite bland. Flavour is quite grainy and grassy as well. Some light sweetness. Is qutie light bodied. Ends on a light bitter note. Boring.

The aroma is sweet and has grains and floral hops.The appearance is pale gold with a medium sized head. The flavor is similar to the aroma with a medicinal bitterness. The palate is smooth. I think this is either not that good or stale.

An awful smell of of a stale swamp predominates from this bland corny mess. I would have expected better from this part of the world. The cheap taste of corn is overwhelming. Avoid.

Bottle -- Pale yellow with insignificant head that quickly dies. Smells of bread. Tastes of bread. Insignificant palate. An OK beer with pizza but otherwise why bother.

Bottle. Light golden with light white head. Malt and citrus in aroma. Fresh (too fresh) flavour of malt. Thin body and boring.

Tap, The Rutland and Derby, Leicester. Golden with a fairly large head. Aromas are biscuit and grain with vanilla. Flavours are biscuit malts with light fruit notes. A low rent version of Budvar - still, not bad.

Think of the opening to the second Godfather movie: A column of weary looking Italians march in a dry, arid field. It is a funeral procession, elegiac and rattled. The mourners march, kicking up a trail of yellow dust. Suddenly a gun shot rings out, people panic, and a young man collapses. Tragedy strikes, as it only can Sicily. Now it’s 2006, and a weary college student and his father hike along the steep streets of Taormina. The roads are lined with exhausted tourists, marching from the gelateria to a shoe shop and back, straining under the beating of a hot Sicilian sun. The boy and his father are soaked like they just came from a Turkish bath, and right when their limbs give away they reach a small cluster of chairs and tables atop the craggy road. There they point to the first items their weary fingers can manage and find themselves eating and drinking, slowly replenishing their strength. Then a sip rings out. Death. Tragedy strikes again. The boy collapsed on the cheap checkered table, a Birra Messina in his hand. The father weeps. Though the story may be embellished, the sentiment is not. Lord, what an awful beer. After sweating my organs out I figured anything cold and bubbling would taste good enough to at least re-hydrate my parched tongue. But even in that simple task the Messina failed. It must have some sophisticated molecular engineering behind it because even after two full glasses I was still thirsty and my mouth was still dry. I had to rely on the grease on the pizza to wet my palate. Even the ice at the stinking fish market next door seemed attractive after this disastrous beer went down. Let me scour for a lesson in this beer somewhere. Ah, here’s one: pale lagers make you want to throw the nearest liftable piece of furniture. You know, this didn’t taste a shade different from all the waste college kids back at home drown their sorrows in. It was still tasteless, flavorless, a bit dry and as mentioned above, hardly a liquid at all. I’d be better off swallowing hot coals and laying in the hot sun until the local Catholic parish picked me up and gave me some spare holy water. Ugh. Man, I thought Europe was sophisticated. Screw that. I’m going to Wal-Mart, ‘git me some O’Douls.

Tastes like it looks: like a sweet pale lager. It’s mostly inoffensive apart from a sugary adjunct base. Makes me even think I’d prefer an Australian lager. Maybe.