Draught at Rock Bottom South Denver. Pours brown with a small, rocky, off-white head, diminishing with fair lacing. Aroma is heavy malt (cookie, caramel, nutty), light hops (herbs), average yeast (dough) with notes of toffee. Medium bodied, thin texture, average carbonation, and a metallic finish. Short duration, light sweetness, acidity, and bitterness.

pours, well, brown. it has a skin of khaki gray head. smells of caramel, molasses, and brown sugar. i’m really a sucker for brown ales, and this one is playing the right notes to make me a sucker. light chocolate sweetness with a non descript background bitter. light caranel in the finish with a woody balance. smooth caramel and peanut butter flavor that comes out to stay later in this. a bit of lingering metallic is here too.

The Rock Bottom set of reviews is a reflection of my hasty attempt to drink a small quantity of many beers and produce accurate and helpful reviews. Clearly I’ve failed, but I hope my incoherent and cryptic critiques can help at least a few folks who wander in and want to know what to order. No matter how hard I try, or how closely I study this beer, nothing particularly unique stands out. It’s just there. It simply exists. And that is fine for some beer drinkers, but not me. A beer has to have a certain special mark, a trick or a slogan, a specialty or a profession. But everything about this particular brew, from the name to the taste, fades away into obscurity. The color is a saving trait, of sorts, being a deep, British pub red color; almost a carnal shade. The smell mimics soy sauce, which is permissible but not preferable. They advertise the Old Elk as being full of chocolate flavors, but I couldn’t pick up any no matter how hard I focused on luscious cocoa beans. I even thought of Willy Wonka, but to no avail. There is no chocolate; don’t believe the lies! Actually, the beer reminds me more of an attempt to be deep and meaty, like steak sauce. But there it fails too. Overall, a disappointing beer, which is okay because I won’t remember it as a success or a failure.