FIRST DRAUGHT: Prairie White doesn’t live up to first impression

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This article was published 10/08/2018 (2794 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I can’t believe it has already been a few months since Brandon Beer Fest. This year’s edition was certainly their best year yet. The festival had the largest turnout of Manitoban breweries to the event, as well as the most breweries to the festival, in general.

There were a bunch of breweries that didn’t even have their beer available at the MLCC or Liquor Marts that were serving at the event, including Trans Canada Brewing out of Winnipeg, and Corsaire Microbrasserie out of Lévis, Que.

Every year, I generally skipped the Great Western Original 16 booth because I simply don’t like their beer. Their beer is OK if their beer is the only option that’s not a Labatt or Molson product, then it will be definitely bearable. Most of the pubs and restaurants I frequent now days now have at least one or two Manitoban products on tap or in bottle/can, so I’ll generally buy that over any Original 16-branded beer.

Well, at this year’s Brandon Beer Fest, there was consistently a pretty solid line at their booth. I wasn’t too sure why because there were many other booths with better beer. I found out that people were flocking to the booth for their Original 16 Radler, as the Radler trend is only booming here on the Prairies, but they also had a new beer available called the Original 16 Prairie White Ale, a Belgian-style wheat beer brewed with a medley of Saskatchewan two-row barley, spring wheat and choice hop varietals. I’m a sucker for a Belgian-style wheat beer, so you could probably already tell that I was excited at Beer Fest that they finally branched out a bit and started to experiment with more craft-focused styles for once.

Their Prairie White tops out at 4.8 per cent ABV and is brewed with Saskatchewan coriander and is described as having fresh, bright orange and lemon notes with subtle spiciness.

The first impression I got from pouring this into a glass was that this certainly has the appearance of the typical Belgian-style wheat beer, and I consider myself an expert on the style after drinking many various witbiers over the past decade and half. The beer pours a bright, cloudy yet orange body with a light amount of carbonation in the body and a hefty finger’s worth of off-white head on top. The thing about Belgian wheat beers is that the beer’s head will make or break the beer, so a nice frothy head is always a good sign.

I’m finding the aroma of the Prairie White has a nice, light coriander spice to it, giving it a hint of bubble gum and sweetness to it. The Saskatchewan two-row barley seems to be more dominant in this beer over the spring wheat as I’m getting a bit of a grainy, cereal, and crisp aroma that reminds me of an Original 16 Pilsner rather than a witbier. The wheat is certainly there, but it’s not giving off a liberal wet pizza dough aroma that I was hoping for, it’s just light, faint and distant.

The thing about the taste is that the barley is overly dominant here as well. I was hoping for a biscuity, sweet, coriandery presence to it, but instead I’m getting a flavour that’s reminiscent to a Prairie Pilsner, which isn’t a bad thing … but when I’m craving a witbier, I was hoping the coriander and orange peel flavours would be more dominant. This is quite reminiscent to their classic Original 16 Pale Ale, which is actually pretty darn good nowadays, but where’s the wheat?

The flavour has a grainy wet barley taste with a very light wheaty pizza dough taste to it, there’s a bit of toastiness from the malt, and notes of lemon and grassy hops. The coriander is non-existant except for in the aftertaste, where I get a light hint of spice lingering on the tongue. As I was about to wrap up my review, I poured the last quarter of the beer into the glass to give my final thoughts and I found that there was a hefty amount of sediment at the very bottom of the can, which changed the beer quite a bit. The beer was now sweeter, there was more of a bubble gum sweetness and the coriander spice was finally popping up, but unfortunately that’s too little, too late.

I wish the notes I got from the beer at the very end were showing up early on when I was first sampling the beer, so instead this tasted more like an unfiltered Pilsner — which isn’t a bad thing, but when I’m looking forward to trying a Belgian-style wheat beer, it didn’t live up to the first impression from Brandon Beer Fest back in April.

In most Belgian wheat beers, there’s almost always going to be a bit of sediment at the bottom as it’s an unfiltered-style. But in the case of this beer, that sediment would have came in handy if it was blended with the rest of the beer early on. In the end, I still enjoyed the beer, it had a nice unfiltered Pilsner-like presence to it, but I wish the Saskatchewan spring wheat popped out with the coriander and orange peel early on.

Great Western’s Original 16 Prairie White is mostly found in 355-ml 15-packs at Liquor Marts (10th and Victoria, South End) and various beer vendors for $26.66, as well as in 473-ml cans at various Liquor Marts and vendors throughout the area, and possibly on draught at venues such as The Dock on Princess and Prairie Firehouse.

» Rating: 3/5 Pints

» Cody Lobreau is a Canadian beer blogger who reviews every beer he can get his hands on as he believes that he should try every beer twice to get an understanding if it’s truly good or bad.

» BeerCrank.ca