Pike Kilt Lifter Scotch Ale

Pours a pretty golden amber with low carbonation, Mild smoky aroma. Full bodied, mildly sweet. creamy. good.

12 oz bottle, no date, courtesy of Larry Pitonka. Consumed at cellar temperature, from a St. Ambroise glass. No visible yeast in the bottle but the pour is very murky, dusty brown with very little head that decays to a thin ring....tobacco smoke and burnt caramel dominate the nose, joined when warmer by substantial alcohol notes and pungent green hops that don’t really add anything positive but confuse the senses....peaty, earthy character immediately hits the tongue, moderate to strong sweetness, all to the good for a bit until a somewhat unpleasant spoiled fruit/milk note emerges, which ends up rather dominating or at least contesting with the pleasant earthy caramel and, I think, ultimately winning....very low carbonation, somewhat oily, flat mouthfeel....it doesn’t add up to much, frankly.

Copper with a quickly fading beige head. Earthy smokey aroma, flavour is malty with a fair bit of smoke and on the bitter side for a scotch ale. Decent at first but I imagine this beer would get boring quickly.

Copper coloured. Aroma is quite malty and sweet. Pale crystal, some butterscotch. Mouthfeel is kind of slick and diacetyl loaded as well. Not a whole lot of complexity. Seems poorly made. It could use some smoke as well... but I feel that way about almost everything.

This stuff will MESS YOU UP. 1) Because it is so damn GOOD and 2) The alcohol seems to be way up (Even though decription above says 6.6%. I had it at the brewery on tap and maybe its higher that the bottle (Although I have yet to see a bottle) I love the peat smoked flavor with the intense malt. Not sweet as sweet is but sweet malt flavor. Not candy Belgian sweet but scottish sweet. This is like a compressed time and a half scottish. BUY IT at Pikes you will love it if you are a big beer drinker

A very hearty, lightly hopped, strongly malted beer. Lots of good flavor, the malt doesn’t dominate too much. Not a bad beer... sweet name too.

in this epoch of dime-a-dozen blandly titillating brand names enlisted to drive beer and wine sales, it’s not surprising to see another playground level guffaw at the kilt. after a couple hundred years, you’d think the american imagination would come up with some other nugget of scottish culture as apparently fascinating as the kilt, but no, here’s another "kilt lifter" (there are currently 10 other "kilt lifters" listed on ratebeer) and hardy har har, isn’t it amazing what clever stuff you can come up with using only six brain cells? lame name aside, the beer glows like hot bronze on an anvil: fiery yellows and oranges that chew at the borders of being brown, but don’t quite have the requisite darkness. the amount of head on a given specimen varied over the course of my six pack; this final one exploded with a torrent like a crack in a submarine wall, causing me to cover the eruption with my mouth which both loosened molars and introduced beer to remote and previously undiscovered regions of my sinuses. the addition of a verrrrrrrrry cautious amount of peat smoked malt to this brew adds indeed a wafer of interest to an otherwise fairly nondiscript ale in the broad categories of brown-- or red-- or amber-- or whatever. again, i’ve tried this on a half dozen occasions and find it variable: i’ve had some sour, some oxidated, some quite good. in general, tin in the aroma blends with the chaffy malts to suggest a can of golden rolling tobacco along with an open package of starchy rolling papers. rather sweet, with dates and toffee tones among the malts and yeast, with bitterness in a citrus profile and one that is larger than what is typical for the style. a bit too varied for me to rate accurately, i’ll have to give it a fairly neutral rating.

Deep dark color. Malty and sweet aroma. Flavor is of roasted barley, chocolate malt and light hops in the finish.