I’m not necessarily that thrilled with Widmer beer, but I am a big fan of the Widmer Brothers’ Collaborator Project. They’ve really done a great job of putting homebrewers on the map in the Portland area by offering them the opportunity for ordinary folks’ recipies to to be produced on a large scale and distributed around town. So, needless to say, I was pretty excited to try Sled Crasher at the Portland Winter Ale Festival this year. I guess I wasn’t all that impressed. Here’s what I had to say about it at the time:

Before this weekend, the last Collaborator beer I had was Brian Butenschoen’s Hopnosis Double IPA. Hopnosis blew me away and I found myself making several trips to the Pub during the few short weeks that it was available in Portland during the summer. Needless to say, I had high hopes for Sled Crasher. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a let down. It was billed as a winter warmer at the festival, but I think a critical taster would be hard-pressed to classify it as such. I guess after reading the beer described as “rich-tasting” and “full-bodied”, I was expecting something really malty and satisfying. Instead, I got a beer that I felt was a bit thin and way overhopped. The aroma was hard to detect, but I’d say it mostly just smelled hoppy. As a homebrewer, I’d be satisfied with the quality of the beer, but if I were really trying to nail a winter warmer, I’d want to modify the recipe and try again. Don’t get me wrong, the beer was fairly tasty. It just didn’t live up to Widmer’s description that it would “warm the cockles of my heart.”

Since I haven’t had a chance to try the beer since, I guess I don’t have much else to say. To be fair, I’d like to point out that I had already tasted a few strong beers that night before I got around to Sled Crasher and I also tasted it under fairly sub-optimal conditions (in a leaky tent full of smelly people). It certainly wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t leave much of an impression on me.