Genesee Ice: Appearance
Clear, gold/amber hue. Highly effervescent. Forms a large, white, soapy head which retains for a while but eventually dissipates completely.
Genesee Ice: Smell
Generic economy lager smell of grain. I’ve smelled worse.
Genesee Ice: Taste
Beers like Genesee Ice make me wonder what the point of their existence is. If you want to get drunk cheap, there are stronger beers for the same price. And despite the ludicrous marketing hyperbole, there really is nothing “premium” or “robust” about the flavor here. It’s adjunct macro lager as cheap as they come with the taste to match.
The palette starts off surprisingly weak and watery. Nothing but cliché fizzy yellow lager flavor, but weaker than most. Next to no bitterness anywhere in the taste here, which is fine, though I’m not sure this qualifies as a malt liquor proper. I actually do detect a subtle caramel sweetness on the finish, but it’s quickly obscured by a foul taste of cheap, dry graininess. Maybe I’ve built up a tolerance to these types of beers, because it’s not as offensive as other beers of the ilk have been. Still, there’s nothing to genuinely like about the taste. It’s bland, it’s cheap, it’s off-putting, yet there are worse incarnations out there.
Genesee Ice: Drinkability
I often find “gold sodas” like this tend to be quite bubbly at first, but go flat quickly. But in the case of Genesee Ice, it actually stayed well-carbonated throughout. The liquid itself is noticeably thin and has a slightly slick texture. There’s a starchy, cracker-like aftertaste coupled with that of boiled corn. Even when drank ice cold on a hot summer’s night it’s not really refreshing. At 5.5% ABV it’s too weak to be used as a get-drunk-quick vehicle, and too strong to be a casual, sessionable lager.
