Name: Shindig
Brand: Cowbell Brewing Co.
Availability: InStock

Cowbell Brewing Co. leads its description of Shindig with the grain, not the hops.

The Blyth brewery's lager is 4.5 percent ABV in 473 ml cans, and it sits on LCBO shelves alongside the Absent Landlord sale running through October 10. Cowbell calls the highest quality Canadian malted barley the centrepiece of the beer, and credits it with soft but complex cereal and bread-like notes.

The supporting numbers are consistent with that. The brewery records the beer at 14 IBU and 3 SRM, a very pale beer with minimal bittering, and describes the hopping as understated against a clean lager yeast. Its tasting notes run to balanced and light, bready malts, refreshing.

What sets it slightly apart from the sessionable-lager norm is body. Cowbell describes Shindig as medium to full-bodied, and frames the result as a deceptively smooth and easy-drinking experience. Holding onto that weight at 4.5 percent is the deliberate choice in the recipe: most beers built for volume drinking shed body along with alcohol.

That approach leaves the malt exposed. With little hop character and no roast to lean on, a pale lager offers few places to conceal a weak base, which is the long-standing reason brewers treat the style as a difficult one to execute cleanly.

Cowbell serves it at 3 degrees Celsius and suggests BBQ, fried foods and fresh baked pretzels.

Cans are available at the LCBO and through the brewery.

Editor’s Take

Fourteen IBU and a medium-to-full body at 4.5 percent is a quietly contrarian combination, and I mean that as a compliment. The default move for a sessionable lager is to make it light in body as well as light in alcohol - thin it out, chill it down, let the carbonation do the talking. Cowbell has gone the other way and kept the weight while dropping the strength, which puts all the pressure on the malt to be interesting on its own.\n\nThat is why the barley gets named as the centrepiece rather than mentioned in passing. At 14 IBU there is essentially nowhere to hide: no hop character to drape over a dull base, no roast, no fruit. What is left is bread, cereal and whatever the yeast declines to strip out. Brewers will tell you that a pale lager is the hardest thing on the list to make well for exactly this reason, and it has always struck me as funny that the style most associated with not thinking about your beer is the one that punishes a sloppy recipe fastest. Cowbell points it at BBQ, fried food and fresh pretzels, and the pretzel suggestion is almost too on the nose - bready beer, bready snack - but it is right.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

Shindig Puts Canadian Malt First and Hops at 14 IBU

Cowbell builds Shindig around Canadian malted barley rather than hops, holding the bittering to 14 IBU. At 4.5 percent it is medium to full-bodied, which is the unusual part.

Source & Editorial