Brew Crew: Well’s Banana Bread Beer

Price: $4.99 / 500 mL (Sobey’s Liquor Store Whyte Ave)

I’m one of those people who has rogue frozen bananas tumbling out of my freezer every time I open it because I just really love banana bread. I love banana bread so much I’m willing to sustain minor injuries every time I open my fridge. So when I encountered Well’s Banana Bread beer, I had an open heart and open mind. 

Oops. How foolish of me. 

Upon pouring, it has a really strange red-and-orange colour and didn’t sustain a head. It smelled like artificial banana-flavored marshmallows and powdered sugar — in a bad way. The beer has very little carbonation and has the acridity of dusty and spoiling grapes you’ve left in your fridge for too long. This is coupled with a strange and artificial sweetness, which is, as I had detected prior the result of artificial banana flavouring. While I enjoy banana candies, the pleasant bitterness that couples good beers was buried underneath the flavour.

(This is an opportunity to throw in the fun fact that artificial banana flavouring doesn’t taste like the bananas we know and love because the flavouring is from bananas that went extinct in the 1980s.)

Overall, I am sad this beer didn’t give me the warm inner hug that is literally the entire point of banana bread.