Small Town Brewery Not Your Father's Vanilla Cream Ale

Beer Name: Not Your Father's Vanilla Cream Ale
Brewery: Small Town Brewery (Wauconda, IL; La Crosse, WI)
ABV: 4.1%
How sold: 6-packs of 12 oz. bottles (should later be sold in 12 oz cans and 16 oz cans)
Where bought: Winco (Vancouver, WA)
Price: $9.88 for a six-pack

Date Purchased: May 29, 2016
Date Opened/Drank: May 30, 2016

When brewed? Year-round hard soda. Not Your Father's Vanilla Cream Ale released in late May 2016, after a month or so of hype.

Where distributed: Small Town Brewery ships nationwide. Find out if Small Town Brewery ships to your area!

What's on the Bottle: "This is beer brewed with spices. We like to think of it as a refreshing creamy ale with Madagascar Vanilla. Best served chilled or pouted in a glass over ice. We know you'll enjoy it. We do."

REVIEW:

Appearance (5%): Poured caramel-brown into a pint glass. Frothy white to off-white head. Poured with more head than past hard sodas from them, but other than that, pretty much what I expected. 4.5/5

Smell (25%): Extreme creamy vanilla. Initially, out of the bottle, it almost smelled like a strawberry milkshake. Overall, again, insert nostalgia here. 5/5

Taste (40%): Immediate creamy vanilla engulfing the mouth and coating the tongue. There is no way to tell there's even alcohol in here. Extremely drinkable and dangerous. 5/5

Mouthfeel (10%): Medium-bodied, mostly due to the creamy aspect of this one. Predictably feels much heavier than the Ginger Ale. Very good carbonation, but not "too" carbonated. 4.75/5

Overall (20%): A world-class hard soda / spiced beer. This one may give Not Your Father's Root Beer a run for its money. To me, Small Town Brewery remains the king of hard sodas. Given the alcoholic content (5.9%) of its two bottled hard soda predecessors, I did a double take when seeing this was only 4.1%. But wow, this blew me away. While people may again say that this is too sweet for them, the purpose was to create that alcoholic soda that gets the nostalgic juices flowing -- which it definitely achieved. In my book, this would make a perfect hard soda float. 5/5

Final Weighted Rating: 4.95/5