Goose Island Matilda

It's helpful to remember that beer experimentation (or beerimentation, as no one calls it) predates the craft movement. If not for some German monks tossing hops into their beer 1,100 years ago, beer might've continued to look very different from what we know today (yes, the majority of beer's existence has been hop-less). Likewise, Belgian brewers, deviating from proud tradition, began toying around with their own pale ale style around World War II--recent enough to be new, but still several decades ahead of craft brew's love affair with the style. Chicago's Goose Island, perhaps as a result of their relationship with their ownership, tends to keep their experiments down the middle: nothing too unexpected but usually pleasantly palatable (all due respect to their exceptional Bourbon County line, which predates the new ownership). And they take an unsurprisingly low risk-high reward tack with their Belgian Pale Ale, Matilda: a beer that should, ideally, be a happy union of wheat and hops.

Matilda pours pale orange, with a decent head for a Belgian.

She smells mostly of wine, perhaps a chardonnay (that's a kind of wine, right?), with a slight plummy aroma.

The plums return on the tongue, in concert with a wheaty, malty aftertaste. The tartness is accompanied by an unexpected fizziness--not quite hopiness (we're getting to that), but close enough that I mistook one for the other at first.

For all its flavor, Matilda retains a light body that's complimented by a medium-to-heavy hop profile that lends a bit of effervescence, ensuring some memorability, though at this point that's not totally necessary.

A happy, if not ecstatic, marriage of styles gives Matilda an even, balanced profile that's pleasant throughout, offering a welcome invitation to continue drinking, all the way through its 765 milliliters.

Grade: B+