Over the Christmas holidays we caught up with family at a restaurant called Kobe inside the Townsville Casino.
This place looks the goods, an interesting entry, flashy table ware and napery. But despite all the promises and the way the place looked, it ended up being a pretty pedestrian meal. I know that I have much better steak meals elsewhere; this probably wouldn’t even hit my top ten list.
It’s probably my own fault though, I went in with such high expectations, but nothing made me want to slap my knee, get out a lighter and stand up shouting and singing like I was in the front row of a Whitesnake concert. Overall it was the little things that let me down, like not having the wines that were listed on their wine list, the slow often inattentive service, I could go on. Perhaps I should have realised when the staff failed to call me back after I had left several messages on the machine to make a booking.
Yet here’s a place that has everything going for it; a great, no, a fantastic position; a food menu that makes a carnivore drool, kitchen staff that have the ability to out cook any of those TV chefs. The only analogy that I could make to it was like having a Lamborghini that you only drive for a one hour on Saturday to the local shop and back, and then you’ve only ever had it up to 60kph.
You know that it can go better; you know it has the ability to perform, but you might as well just drive your cheapo old comfortable trusty Telstar. And is probably less likely to get keyed in the carpark.
And it’s much the same with this week’s drop, Coopers 62 Pilsner.
Here’s a company that has a great pedigree. Cooper’s have shown that they have an outstanding ability to knock out some great beers, well known for their Ales and homebrew kits, they have been around since Noah played fullback for Jerusalem, and they are the only fully Australian owned large scale brewery left these days. I mean these guys know what they are doing when it comes to beer, but for some reason they have dropped the ball here.
Coopers 62 Pilsner has been around a while now, enough time for them to have played and tweaked their recipe to build a beer that isn’t so, I don’t know, pedestrian and unremarkable. The aromas are a bit plastic, there is as touch of aromas from the hops, that kind of remind me a bit of the pines and gums we used to cut down to use as Christmas trees when we were kids.
There isn’t much happening on your tongue either, a mixture of bitters and hops and not too much else. It says Saaz hops on the bottle but I wasn’t picking up any of those notes. A slight touch of lychee, and then it all drops off to a resiny, metallic bitterness. A touch watery and failed to hold any sort of a head in the glass.
Looking back now I wonder if my six pack had been left out in the sun while they were unloading at my local bottleshop.
I realise that Cooper’s, in fact all breweries, have to grow and meet market demand. So my positive spin on the 62 Pilsner is twofold:
one – I’m glad that Coopers have invested the time and effort into moving away from their traditional Ale styles and developing a Pilsner. Especially if it means that Coopers makes enough profit every year to keep producing their exceptional Extra Strong Vintage Ale.
And two – the 62 has a really cool flashy bottle. Even looks flashier than a Crown Lager bottle.
