I am going to review Tommyknocker Brewery’s Maple Nut Brown Ale. Some sites have this beer listed as an American Brown Ale, but upon the first smell and taste I decided it would do this beer an injustice to give it the American Brown Ale label. There is no official claim from the brewery that I can find, so I will compare it to what I think they were maybe going for. This beer is, in my opinion, closer to a Northern English Brown with maple added, than the American version. I wonder if because the beer is brewed here in the US some people mistake it for what an American Brown Ale is. If you read the style guidelines links I provided you can see that there is a big difference in hop presentation, and whether or not the beer is American or English does not have to do with where the beer was brewed (at least by modern definition), but the ingredients and flavor/aroma presentation.

Off the pour the beer is a nice brownish garnet color and fairly clear. It poured a small khaki color head, the head was persistent but disappeared a quarter way through the pint. The aroma is of sweet caramel and some maple, the aroma really suggests that this will be a sweet beer. There is not much in the way of hops in the aroma at all. This is one give away of why I didn’t want to put it in the American Brown category. There is a slight nuttiness to the beer as well, which is better suited to the Northern English variety as well.
The flavor is rich and sweet, as I expected. It is just a bit too sweet for a Northern Brown, but one flaw in a specialty style is easy to overlook. There is a deeply intense flavor of caramel and maple with some nutty character to it. It is almost too much because the sweetness sticks on your tongue for a while after you drink it. The hop bitterness is medium, with just enough punch to keep the beer from being overly cloying. But tone down the hops any more and you would feel like you would be drinking liquid candy in my opinion. Still there is a toasty pleasant quality to the beer that makes this feel like a cool spring campfire beer. But since it is warm and muggy right now, I am not very turned on by this one, which is something I have to overlook for now. The mouthfeel is medium/full with a low level of carbonation, which adds to the syrupy feel. The other reasons I don’t think this beer was intended to be an American Brown is because the hop presence is so low. The bitterness in the American brown should be substantial in comparison to this beer. In here, the hops can way to easily go unnoticed if you don’t fully realize how sweet this beer would appear to be without the hops.
Overall, I give this beer a C+. It is a good solid tasting beer, but even on a cool spring night, you wouldn’t probably drink more than 2 of these. The flavor of maple and caramel is nice at first, but you get tired of it by the end of the glass and are looking for something a bit more dry (which if it was a bit more dry it would better fit a Northern English Brown as well). This is still a drinkable beer and not disgusting by any means, but it is more of a “hey, come try this beer” instead of a “hey, you gotta try this beer.”
-Jason