White Star Alehouse, Round 2 Two Hearted Ale & Dead Guy Ale

To commence our four-day 4th of July weekends, Greg and I hit up a local drinking and dining establishment in downtown Cedar Rapids. White Star Alehouse has an excellent beer menu with dozens of beers on tap and twice as many in bottles. I love the historic building, vintage accents, and relaxing atmosphere. It's definitely a gem where you can try a variety of brews, devour delicious food, chat with your friendly and funny server, and easily while away a couple hours. I wish the above photo did the bar justice. It was very casual, elegant, and cool.

As mentioned in the Round 1 of this beer review post, we chowed down on a delicious appetizer of chicken avocado egg rolls. Avocado, chicken, red onion, and sun-dried tomatoes fried up in a crisp egg-roll wrapper and dipped in either fresh cilantro salsa or sour cream and chives. It makes my mouth water just to describe them and see that photograph. Want. More. Right. Now.

Before I start salivating onto the keyboard, let's get on with the beer reviews!

For round two, I got a Two Hearted Ale (Would you look at that head?!) and Greg got a Dead Guy Ale. Again, the calamari at the table behind us was clogging up Greg's nostrils. ;)

Two Hearted Ale

Brewed by: Bell's Brewery, Inc. | Michigan, US

Style | ABV: American IPA | 7.00% ABV

Bell’s Two Hearted Ale is a pretty solid IPA.  It is not as strong as some like Stone Ruination.  Even though the calamari smell had started to dissipate, I still had a hard time smelling this beer. It smelled pretty hoppy like most IPA’s do.  The color was clear gold color with a good head and lacing.  This beer was hoppy but made my whole mouth a little tingly with a slightly sour aftertaste.  This is a good IPA for the IPA lovers out there.  I give this one 4.16/5. 4.16/5 | look: 4.75 | smell: 4 | taste: 4 | feel: 4.25 | overall: 4.5

After drinking the big vanilla porter, a few tasting drinks of Greg's Red's Rye PA left me craving some hops. This Two Hearted Ale was the answer. Clear and golden amber in color, this ale had lots of thick, bubbly white head and left behind lovely lacing. It smelled hoppy, floral, and bit citrusy - like hops, flowers, and grapefruit. It tasted hoppy and floral, in a very perfumey way. Crisp, bitter, and ever so slightly sweet. It's a fizzy, medium body that's kind of astringent and tingles on the tongue. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It had the bitterness of hops mixed with an interesting sweet, citrus, floral perfume kind of taste and fragrance. I loved the effervescence, too. 4.5/5 | look: 4.5 | smell: 4.5 | taste: 4.5 | feel: 4.5 | overall: 4.5

Dead Guy Ale

Brewed by: Rogue Ales | Oregon, US

Style | ABV: Maibock / Helles Bock | 6.50% ABV

There are some beers you will remember forever.  Either as absolutely amazing or absolutely terrible.  I’m not going to say that this beer is horrid, but it was not a good experience.  A lot of the other reviews I saw were pretty positive for this beer.  Alas, I cannot say that Rouge Dead Guy Ale is a beer I would recommend to anyone.  When it was brought to us, it looked like a darn good beer. It was a medium dark amber color with a thin head.  The smell had a yeasty-malty smell, but with a hint of sweaty-ness.  The kind of sweaty-ness you get from the stinky kid in your PE class.  We tried it anyway. It was malty and the sweaty transferred to a sweaty taste on the tongue.  The waiter came over and asked how it was. I said it was “okay” because maybe it would grow on me.  No, the more I drank, the worse it got.  The second time he came around he told us about his experience with the same beer. It was the same as us... not too crazy about it.  So, we had a fun conversation about some more watery beers. (Keep your eyes peeled. There will be a fun post later on some of these.)  Overall, (Sorry, Rogue) this was a flop.  I would not recommend anyone have to subject their taste buds to this ale.  I give it a 1.94/5. 1.94/5 | look: 4.25 | smell: 2.5 | taste: 1 | feel: 4.25 | overall: 1.75

This beer looked good: clear, coppery brown in color, and with a thin layer of head. I wasn't too keen on the scent. It smelled kind of dank and left something to be desired. What I did pick up on was yeast, malt, and maybe a bit of caramel. It tasted malty and wheat-ish, but sweaty. And there was a tinge of caramel in there. I don't have a whole lot to say about this ale other than that I wasn't a fan. I love what I've had from Rogue in the past (HUGE fan of Rogue Mocha Porter), but this ale (and probably any ale in this style) just isn't for me. 1.74/5 | look: 3.25 | smell: 2 | taste: 1.5 | feel: 1.5 | overall: 1.75

Check out Round 1 of our visit to White Star Alehouse here.