Roots Organic Island Red

Brewed by Roots Organic Brewing
Style: Altbier
Portland, Oregon USA

HUge frothing monster head.I HATE when bottle do this even with a very gentle pour. Hazy amber beer eventually makes an appearance below the head. Nice malty aroma balanced by slightly grassy hops. Taste is like WOW, very strange. Bitter malts, hops and a weird ,funky dry bubbly,thick with oat like flavour.\ I like it but it is very odd on the palate. Like thousands of micro bubbles and yet thick and smooth. One of the strangest " reds" I have ever had.

22 oz bottle. Thicker amber hue with a tannish head, fairly foamy, but poured a bit fast. Rusty sweet malty aroma with hints of hops. Fairly thick body with lots of oaty touches all over the tongue. Very sugary, with brown sugar hints...sour molasses a little as well. Nice little grapefruity singe near the end to make a very well rounded and different red...good stuff!

Roasted barley dominates the flavor of this beer. An imperial red might be the best description.

Ruby-amber with islands of head. Enjoyable malt-backbone complexes well with hopping. Surprised to see this is an altbier. Definitely characteristic of a red ale, albeit with some altbier wood-sour notes. Quite bitter-sour finish. Eh.

slow pour produced a glass full of foam, after dumping that eventually got a little bit of cloudy dark copper with a huge beige head, good lacing, overall actually too much foam. smell is faint, some malt, some earth, some caramel, few hops, musty like a box of old clothes. taste is moth balls, raw hops, some malt, some caramel, the foam is very bitter, and that wonderful organic aftertaste that ruins almost all beers., end is slightly bitter.

In the bomber bottle from HyVee CB. Molotov cocktail-like in its explosive nature. This Old Faithfulled its way right out of the bottle after opening. Hey, have you bastards ever heard of a HYDROMETER? The color of what beer was left was a very dark amber/murky sepia. This tasted like a rookie homebrew where you get the amount of hops way overboard because you liked the last batch so much that five times the ounces will be five times better. Avoid this mediocre clunker.

This red ale poured very slowly since the foam overwhelmed the liquid. Once I managed to reach the beer, I found it to be pretty tasty.and complex. It doesn’t taste at all like a stout. Thre is a carbonated and creamy caramel malt base with a slightly bitter finish.

28-Aug-08 (22-oz bottle: Purchased 27-Aug-08 for $4.99 at the Pizza Port Bottle Shop in Carlsbad, CA) A new bottle from a new retail shop, but the result is the same: a foaming mess. The beer foams out of the bottle, and it foams right out of the glass too. There’s so much carbonation that when I scooped the foam out, it reforms and oozes out of the glass again. Good think I had a pile of junk mail nearby to keep the volcanic action from making a real mess as I twice had to run for the kitchen sink. The red-amber body is cloudy, in large part from the sea of carbonation bubbles. Fortunately, the beer tastes and smells better than the previous bottle. Hops are resiny and bitter, with loads of pine and grapefruit rind, but unlike before, there is sufficient malt presence and richness to balance the beer so the hops don’t seem nearly as aggressive. Perhaps the previous bottle was indeed showing signs of infection, and the bugs had eaten away at the malty richness. Malts are caramely and moderately sweet. There’s a touch of plastic phenolics in the flavor, but it’s mostly noticeable only in the ensuing eructations, which are unavoidable given the ridiculous carbonation level. The nose is malty, caramely, and mildly sweet-smelling, but surprisingly only mildly hoppy. The beer is medium in body, highly carbonated obviously, but still quite smooth and perhaps even a little velvety on the palate. The palate remains refreshed from the carbonation and the crisp, hoppy bitterness. Once the foaming and carbonation subside, the beer maintains a half-inch layer of head, light-tan in color, with plenty of dense, ringed lacing on the glass. Overall, while the uncontrollable foaming was a significant aggravation, the actual beer has been much more enjoyable this time around. But only because the beer was fresh. I suspect that if I held onto this bottle a few months, I might have seen similar issues as the last time.

24-Aug-08 (22-oz bottle: Purchased 12-May-08 for $5.19 at Hollingshead Deli in Orange, CA) It’s difficult making heads or tails of this beer. Opening the bottle, a loud and long release of carbonation causes concern, but the beer did not foam out of the bottle. However, even a very careful pour results in a glass nearly full of foam. After scooping out most of the foam and pouring more beer into the glass, then waiting for the newly added foam to die down a little, there is finally enough actual liquid in the glass to proceed. The smell is fairly harsh and not the least bit inviting. The faint, background aroma of caramely malts is easily conquered by the strongly phenolic aroma of plastic and a green, weedy hop scent. In the entry, vague fruitiness and lightly sweet, caramely malts make a brief appearance on the tongue, but almost at once, acrid hop water this becomes, with a fair amount of plastic, soap and metal in the flavor as well, most notably in the finish and the clinging aftertaste. The palate-scorching hops are harsh, astringent and aggressively bitter, piney and deeply resiny, showing some grapefruit rind bitterness without the citrus flavor. Medium in body, so there’s definitely a malty presence, but it lacks any richness. Very dry mouthfeel, highly carbonated, teeth scraping and astringent bitterness, all are unpleasant on the palate. Hazy, deep-amber in color with large carbonation bubbles racing swiftly upward in streams, and when all is said and done, the off-white foam finally settles down to a rocky and large-bubbled layer, leaving ugly globs of foam on the glass. Overall, determining whether the massive carbonation and strong phenolics were a result of contamination required a bit of internal debate at first, but this seems mostly to be the work of the hop profile. Grossly and recklessly overhopped, and the choice of hops is one-dimensional -- an unappealing dimension at that. As a whole, the beer is terribly out of balance on the palate, almost undrinkable to me and certainly not enjoyable. However, if I see this beer on tap at any time, I’ll give it another shot, but I’ll be sure to only ask for a taster first. (4, 3, 3, 2, 6 = 1.8)