Shergill IPA - Rhinelander Brewing Company, Monroe

This beer came to me from Wisconsin in a mixed box of bottles I received as a gift a couple weeks ago. Most of my attention was focused on the New Glarus bottles I received and I completely overlooked this Shergill IPA. This bottle is fairly nondescript, it's a simple red, white and green label with an Indian parade elephant on the bottom. I decided to open up this bottle today because it'll be one of the few early fall 70+ degree days we'll have left. I've got a pork shoulder on the smoker, the dog is sleeping on the deck and things seem pretty great... then I went and ruined it all by pouring a glass of what has to be the worst beer I've had this year. Seriously, it's bad, really bad...

This Shergill IPA pours a hazy orangish color, a bit like a Weizenbock. There is practically no head on this beer no matter how aggressively you pour it into your glass. The aroma is quite subdued for an IPA, but there are noticeable amounts of hops in the nose. This beer smells mostly grassy but it seems like there may have been a small addition of more floral hops at some point. This smell like a rather light IPA that's starting to fade a bit due to age.

...and that concludes the section of this post where I say somewhat nice things about this beer. When I took my first sip of this Shergill IPA I thought to myself, "This is weird... no, this is bad... no, this is really bad..." This beer tastes a little like how it looks, vaguely like a Weizenbock and almost nothing like the IPA it's trying to masquerade as. There's a strange buttery sweetness when you take a drink of this beer and it only gets worse as it move across your palate and turns to a semi-sour caramel candy flavor. At no point while I was drinking this beer did I find any hop flavor or bitterness. It seems like these guys set out to make an IPA but forgot to place a hop order and decided to throw in a Hefeweizen yeast strain for the hell of it. Like I said, this beer is bad, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.