Now the fourth and final Kona beer to try. A 5.8% alk pale ale, the label says it has a coppery color, though i’d call it more dark yellow than coppery. They still win for great bottles, it’s just that whatever’s inside them is, to be charitable, less than awesome. This one’s probably the best of the four, at least in this one the distasteful additive to Kona beers is masked better by a fuller beer body.
But it’s still there. That bitter ingredient that tastes like rat poison, a much different bitter than normal beer-flavor bitterness. They’re adding something to all the Kona beers, assumedly to make them stand out in the crowd, but whatever it is, it tastes terrible. Someone at Kona made a bad decision, and a side effect of that bad decision is having their beer made in Memphis, Tennessee while the label talks about catching waves and watching awesome volcanoes.
Where, exactly, does one surf in Memphis? How many volcanoes are an hour’s drive from Tennessee? My last Kona beer to taste and review, and definitely my last Kona beer to ever taste at all. Maybe beer brewed in their home shop on Hawai’i is better, but the foul thing they’ve got licensees making in their name in New Hampshire, Tennessee, Washington and Oregon is just an embarrassment.
Rating for this one is 2.9 and i advise every person to avoid all Kona Brewing beers.