Ballast Point Yellow Tail Ale: Beer of Confusion

My favorite bar in Phoenixville is The Pickering Creek Inn. The beer selection is always good, with some new treats every week. One of the new selections at my last visit was an offering from San Diego's Ballast Point brewery called Yellow Tail Ale. At 4.6% apv, it was one of the lighter beers on The Pick's menu.

I asked Matt the Bartender what he thought of the Yellow Tail, and he sort of shook his head. "Not my style," he said as he poured me a shooter-sized sample. I knocked it back, but honestly wasn't sure what to think. It's bitter, not sour, with a sort of creamy finish. Did I like it? I needed to do some further research.

The beer-to-head ratio was definitely better on a full pint, and it went down easily. The light body is made for session drinking, but I'm not convinced the flavor does the same. The head left a nice lacing on the glass and the gold color was pleasant and unembarrassing - always an important part of a beer. Still unsure that I liked it, I had to order another.

The second pint provided no further answers, nor did the third. Matt the Bartender, puzzled by my own puzzlement, decided to give the Yellow Tail another test tasting of his own. "Wait, I kind of like it now," he said, "it doesn't taste anything like I thought it did before." This is perhaps the most ambiguous beer of all time. By the fourth pint, I was questioning what else in life I might be this unsure of. Should I get an iPhone? Do I really prefer dogs over cats? Am I really happy? Did I spend too much time in the boys' locker room back in middle school? Gaze into the abyss too long, and the abyss gazes back. Needless to say, I cried myself to sleep that night.

The next day, some Internets Research revealed that Yellow Tail is Ballast Point's take on a Kolsch, which is a style of beer native to Cologne, Germany. According to Ballast Point's Internets website, there are currently no Kolsch-style beers being imported in America. Suddenly the pieces began to fall into place: American palettes are too Neanderthal to actually taste this beer.

Yes. That must be it. Years of pesticide-laced, salt-loaded fast food, mercury-laden seafood, and rice-based macrobrews have poisoned our taste buds to a point where we can't possibly appreciate the subtleties of a Kolsch. Our brains, struggling mightily to make sense of the stuff, are eventually driven over the cliff's edge into nihilistic oblivion.

Either that, or this beer just doesn't have much flavor.