Melbourne Bitter

Brewed by Carlton & United Breweries (CUB)
Style: Pale Lager
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Clear yellow color, short head. Aroma is a bit smelly, soft sweet, bit flowery. Some vanilla in taste, slightly bitter.

800 ml bottle. Pale golden colour, thin white head. Honey malt aromas, apple, and candyish. Flavour is slightly malty, light honey, caramel, and a bit of dust. Nothing really special or distinct, but better than many other macro lagers.

Pale golden, clear, medium head. I wouldn’t go so far as calling this "foul", but it is pretty boring. Sweet malt is really all you get for flavour (the same as all corn-adjunct, over-processed pale lagers on the market). I wouldn’t choose to drink it again if an alternative were available, but I wouldn’t turn it down if the beerfridge was empty on a Friday night. This is my standard review for all "two-star-or-less" piss.

The Australian city from which this pale lager takes its name was nearly named after the explorer John Batman. ’Batmania’ was seriously considered before they named it after the usual crusty old Pommy lord. I mention this because it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than the beer. Melbourne Bitter is another of CUB’s identikit lagers. God knows how regular drinkers can tell the difference, but they swear they can. It has the familiar wafer-thin head, a bit like a freshly-sprinkled urinal. Unlike several other CUB products, this does at least have some hops in the aroma, besides the usual wet cardboard. The flavour, however, is cardboard all the way. The hops are only faintly present as a faint harshness in the finish. This is marginally better than VB and most of the other usual suspects.

The most drinkable product from good old carlton. Pretty standard lager colors and carbonation. Has just a bit of that metallic taste that VB is so famous for. The bitterness is a bit clumsy and harsh in the finish. No perceivable hop flavor.

Canned. Deep golden, airy head. Oranegy aroma. Sweet and mellow with lingering flavour of aging vegetables, old socks and butyric acid. Leaves a flavour in your mouth that is reminiscent of the one an avid beer drinker has in his mouth the day after a serious beer festival. This beer is not lacking in taste, it is just tasting plain awful!

Can. From Australia (gift from a travelling colleague). Served at 4C. Yellow lager with a thick big bubbled head. Rather unpleasant sulfur laden corny aroma. In mouth, actually not all bad. Rather sweet malt, with actually some nice crisp hops in finish. Drinkable, after all.

Bottle. I had this from the fridge on my Uncle Don’s back porch in Westleigh. Those of you saying that this is better than VB are smoking gumtree leaves. I t seems that the brewers decided to get rid of its bad corn taste by dumping extra worthless no-taste hops into the boil and boiling for 6 hours to lose any flavor at all. This is poor. Not a good beer at all. Pale yellow color, nose of garbage, no head, carbonated like hell to kill the palate. For my U.S. brethren this should be called Old Australia or Australia’s Best. Definitely the "Beast" down under!