Brewery: Matt Brewing Company, Utica, NY

Brewery Description: “A beer lover’s dream! This classic irish stout and amber lager blend is malty, yet pleasantly bitter with many complex flavor notes. Look for a deep brown-black color and full-body”

Brew Style: Black and Tan (in this case, a stout and an amber), 5.40% ABV

Recommended Glassware: English Pint, Tumbler, Dimpled Mug, Stein

The Ugly Truth: Is so goddamn ugly, I don’t even know where to begin really.  Holy eff’ing sh*t, this stuff sucked donkey balls.  If you don’t know what that experience would be like, ask Carl cause he can tell you (kidding buddy).  I’m not even sure how much of review I feel like writing for this.  Right off the bat though: a prebottled Black and Tan is a god forsaken, incestious crime against beer.  If you want a black and tan, buy the damn beers and make one yourself you freakin’ f*cktard!  They are not that hard to make and probably won’t taste like moose piss.  Let’s give it the usual shakedown just for sh*ts and giggles though, shall we?

Appearence:  The best damn thing about the beer.  A nice dark chestnut brown with some red highlights.  Fairly opaque with moderate carbonation rising from the bottom of the glass.  The head was creamy, fairly large with solid rententaion to it and light tan in nature.

Now, here is where things start to go into the sh*tter.  The aroma.  I’ve got two words for you…DRIED VOMIT.  I kid you not, its the first thing that came into my mind when I smelled it.  Dried vomit.  If I took only a short whiff, I could get it to go as good as stale biscuit/toasted 5 day old bread.  The second I took a nose full of aroma…BAM!!!1  Dried vomit comes right back.  I actually had to make myself take a drink of it, so afraid of the taste I was from the aroma.

The taste, thank god, was a hell of a lot better than the aroma.  Of course, since the aroma was so bad this is the equivalent of saying that a kick in the nuts is preferable to the jumper cables to the balls that you received earlier (wait…can’t resist…South Park moment…I had to kill him.  He shocked Santa’s balls!!).  Still, all told the taste still sucked and was completely unimpressive.  I found the body to be medium at best, with a near complete lack of carbonation to it.  I got some coffee/roasted flavors at the very start, but they died fast.  There was some faint sweetness at the end, but that also died quick.   The finish was nothing impressive, but at least there was some lingering hops aftertaste.  Except that also sucked, because it had a nasty resinous character.  Other than that, I would have rather been drinking water.

Saranac Black and Tan is just flat out not worth the money in my opinion.  The stout and the amber are probably quality beers by themselves, but mixed together they evidently undergo a chemical reaction that produces suckdom.  Like I said before, if you really want one, man up and go buy a six pack of Bass and a four pack of Guinness cans and make one yourself.  Or if you want something different, I used to make something called a Courageous Irish Apple.  Take some Woodpecker hard cider and layer John Courage Amber on top of it.  Damn tasty.

Verdict: It gets a 2 out of 10 bottlecaps, solely because the comment that goes with 2 bottlecaps fits it better.