Ithaca Beer Review: Excelsior Eleven

I was in Wegmans the other day and I realized it had been some time since I did a beer review, so I moseyed on back to the beer section to take a look. After searching for a while I had got down to two choices, the Ithaca Beer Eleven or a nice 750 ml of Delirium Tremens from Belgium. I went back and forth for a bit, but went back to my old rule. If you can't decide, drink local beer. With that Ithaca was the winner!

Here we go:

Appearance: It was pretty dark, almost black. It poured pretty flat, I had to start really pouring it roughly to get the small amount of head you see above. The head was light brown and dissipated almost immediately.

Aroma: The initial aroma is coffee. The more I smelled it the more it smelled like coffee grounds/espresso. This makes sense because Ithaca ages the beer on locally roasted Sumatran Coffee beans.

Taste: Its taste follows up the aroma nicely. It has a lot of strong coffee notes, as well as some bitterness with a slight hint of dark chocolate. It is not too light, but not really heavy either. However, I was very disappointed in the carbonation level. This beer was very flat, it reminded me of a breakfast beer, you know when you used to stay up too late drinking and you still would have a half a pint glass of beer, so you would stick it in the fridge, and then drink the flat beer in the morning.

Overall: It was an ok beer, it definitely did not live up to the high standards of what the Excelsior series had delivered to me in the past. This is the 3rd beer I have tried from that line and the other two were excellent, this one fell way short of that mark. I would probably not buy this label again, but I also wouldn't turn it down if someone else paid for it.

Keep 'em tippin'!