Kotas Reviews Shiner Holiday Cheer

Ah, it's a brand new year here at Kotas Reviews, and we're just finishing up the last of the eggnog and putting away the decorations. Last year was a good one as far as reviews go, and I hope that this year is just as full of unique reviewing opportunities as the last one! That said, I think some beer is needed. Today we take a look at Shiner's holiday brew, the appropriately named Holiday Cheer.

Why is holiday in such small letters?

As with their Oktoberfest brew the people at Spoetzl Brewery really know how to properly theme a label to the occasion. Clearly a Shiner product, but the red and green accents are completely different from their usual yellow and black, and it has just enough seasonal art touches (holly, snowflakes) to seem right at home in a gift basket. I'm loving the holiday labels this year on my various beers. Let's see how it looks in the glass!

Brownest of the Holiday Beers.

It looks like a nice brown ale, though the label says it was brewed with peaches and pecans. That's very Southern for a Christmas beer. I grew up in the South and I don't really remember peaches being a big thing during the holidays, though pecans have always been popular. Eh, I'm sure it's fine. I mean, how could I go wrong twice in one year?

Well, shows what I know about anything. Yeah, I'm not super pleased with this beer. The initial flavor is decent despite its peachy overtones, but it's got a lingering bitterness that hints at poorly roasted pecans. The underlying "beerness" is fine, but all the little accents are wrong. It's like when you walk into a restaurant and they have holiday stuff up, but on closer inspection its for a different holiday that you would think. It's not awful, certainly, and in fact may be just the beer for someone else. But it certainly ain't for me.

On the FACE Rating System, this gets 1 frowny face solely on disappointment. If it hadn't been pitched as a holiday beer, it would probably get 0 faces, but I was expecting a least SOMETHING I thought would be Christmasy, or at least New Year's-y. What I got instead was a beer that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, and so tries a bunch of different things to see if something works. Or maybe it was just made with whatever they had leftover in the "odd mixin's" bag. Great label though.