REVIEW 27: DREAM MACHINE

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN:  USA

BREWERY:  Magic Hat Brewing Company

STYLE:  Pale Lager; IPL

ABV:  5.7%

PURCHASE:  Six-pack of 12-oz. bottles, $11.99.

SERVING:  12-oz. bottle, poured into pint glass. Moderately heady but not overwhelmingly so. Both a standard and slow pour produced heads of one and a half to two inches, with good retention.

APPEARANCE:  Auburn-caramel color and transparent. Sudsy white head with decent lacing.

BOUQUET:  If ever there was a beer with a dead-even hop-malt ratio with practically nothing else of note in the aroma, it's this one. I strained to pick up some sort of spice or citrus factor, but came up empty. Although, a hint of apple skin seemed to lurk in the background.

PALATE:  Soft carbonation. Light-medium body. Slightly sweet front palate that gives way to a mild crescendo of hop bitterness, which in turn partially yields to a yeasty and relatively dry finish. Sam-like aftertaste. Very smooth overall. 

MUSINGS AND METAPHORS:  A relatively recent addition to the Magic Hat lineup, Dream Machine comes, like many offerings from the Burlington, Vermont brewery, in a psychedelic-looking bottle with a font reminiscent of another "machine": The "Mystery Machine" piloted by one Fred Jones in a certain Saturday morning cartoon from Hanna-Barbera. Although, to be fair, the label appears spacier and even trippier than the paint job on the sides of that famous animated van.

As for the beer itself, Magic Hat has a winner here, if not exactly an elite entry in the burgeoning new category of "IPL." What is an IPL? As the abbreviation suggests, it stands for "India Pale Lager." What is India Pale Lager, then? As the name suggests, a "lager version" of an IPA; more specifically, a beer that essentially merges IPA qualities with those of an amber--or perhaps a Vienna--lager. Hence, the Sam Boston Lager-like qualities in the palate. This goes down effortlessly for a hoppy beer, precisely because the amber factor keeps the hop factor in check. As a result, this is one of those beers that seems equally at home as a meal companion, party brew, or cut-the-grass beer on a hot summer day, and equally appealing as a sampling or session choice. 

So far I have found this to be a highly underrated offering, in terms of the reviews from rival sites; BeerAdvocate's users, for instance, have collectively graded this as a C. RateBeer and Untappd haven't judged it much better. Perhaps it's a case of a brewery's reputation preceding itself. I myself have found many of Magic Hat's entries underwhelming, but this one wasn't. Those other sites are wrong this time.




GRADE:  A-