United Nations of Beer

Mill Street organic lager

by Ashley Cotter-Cairns
(UNOB HQ)

Mill Street organic lager: look how tiddly it is compared to a regular beer bottle!

Mill Street organic lager (4.2% ABV)
Mill Street, ON, Canada

If you're any sort of an organic foods sceptic, you'll "know" that organic alternatives to food are bad value for money.

They're smaller, lumpier and generally more expensive. Buying organic is like hiring the worst-looking tart on the corner AND paying more for the pleasure. Right?

Well, the upside is that you will live longer, perhaps, by ingesting less harmful crap. The argument is a good one when you're eating things high up the food chain, like cows, that ingest a lot of pesticides and stuff which get concentrated in their bodies... I think.

To be honest, I buy mostly organic food because we have kids and they're worth the extra, even if there's a tiny chance it will make a long-term difference to his health and well-being.

The one thing you are guaranteed when you go organic is that things will taste better. Even things that already taste really, really good, like cows. Plus, there's the smug sense of satisfaction you get knowing that your fellow man will likely cark it before you do, thanks to those pesticides and things I mentioned earlier.

But where does beer come into it? Without doing much research (or, indeed, any at all), I must conclude that the principle advantage of drinking organic beer is that its ingredients must be organic. These are, of course, low down the food chain, but every little helps.

Okay, so I did a little accidental research and discovered that if 1,000 of us drink organic instead of regular beer, there's an entire bathtub less of toxins we'll piss back into the water supply. (Which makes me think the gesture is coming way too late to do me any favours... but there's a planet at stake and my son has to live on it for quite a while.)

Enough of that, what about Mill Street organic lager itself? Is it any good?

The first thing you'll notice is that it's small. Despite costing $9.95 Cdn for a sixer, this tiddler weighs in at a mere 215ml. To put that in perspective, the average longneck is 340ml. See lads, size DOES matter in some ways. You'll look mildly fruity swigging from one of these in a trendy bar.

In layman's terms, you're paying around $1.65 Cdn per bottle of Mill Street organic lager and you're drinking about 63% as much as a standard bottle of beer.

The smell is neutrally beerish, not unappealing but unlikely to have you running to a dictionary to find comparison words. Wheaty, perhaps. It smells like a harvest field. Then you taste Mill Street organic lager. And...

Chilled or not, it will leave you cold. I found it pleasant, in a mild kind of way, which isn't a shock at 4.2% ABV. You could drink a ton of these and not really notice until your credit card statement arrived.

Fortunately it's not very gassy, but unfortunately you'll perhaps conclude that this is another example of the power of organic marketing. More sizzle, less steak.

Or in this case, less beer for your bucks. Less tasty (though not unpleasant, I should point out), shorter and more disappointing than many good beers, but if you're an organic freak, drinking Mill Street organic lager will make you feel happy, if you can afford to put enough of them away.

After all, you'll live longer than I will, as I drink all the more interesting-tasting beers containing the toxins and other bad stuff. And even if you don't live longer, it might feel as if you are.