The fine folks at Magic Hat offered to send us some beer to review. Your intrepid editors, being quite cheap, were pumped for the opportunity to drink for free. When the big day arrived, the box that arrived in the mail was quite small, much too small to contain the 12 beers in the picture at right. To our dismay, our sampler pack contained only two beers. After regrouping mentally, we broke out the mason jars and carefully parceled out our 3 oz. servings of each brew.
John Steinbacher
Demo: It was pretty good. Just a bit sweet, but not too much. For a dark beer with a 6% ABV, it’s fairly drinkable. But I’m confused as to why it’s marketed as a spring beer. The beer seems confused too — is it a chocolaty Porter disguised as a hoppy IPA? Also, I don’t understand why it’s called Demo and it has a 45 on the label. If you were band creating a demo, chances are you wouldn’t go through all the effort to make vinyl copies of your songs. This definitely should have been the label for Vinyl.
Vinyl: Pretty standard lager. Had a nice clean backend and seemed like a very adequate spring beer. Did not excite me though. I can’t imagine choosing this beer over the hundreds of others that taste pretty much the same. The label was nice — very Vermonty, but I didn’t understand the relevance to vinyl.
Seth Fein
We didn’t get enough to be able to fully appreciate them, but it was certainly better than Schlitz.
Joel Gillespie
I’ve never had a bad free beer, these included.