Mother Earth Brewing- Dark Cloud: Forget The Hype...Drink The Beer!
Monday, August 30, 2010 at 6:08PM | by Steve 
Most of us start out drinking the same yellow fizzy water. We’re not impressed by what we are drinking, but we’re not aware that we are supposed to be impressed. We are taught that beer is for ball games and mowing the lawn and forgetting about the debt you are collecting while playing flippy-cup at your college bar. We are enticed by advertisements and slogans instead of by the beer in our red plastic cup. We should have been taught differently. There are a plethora of beer styles that have been brewed for centuries that are great. We just didn’t know because they were hidden by the surplus of beers that have been stripped of flavor and body and replaced with bland drinkability.
Today I reached into my beer cooler and grabbed a bottle of beer. It’s like it was from The Land of Sky Blue Waters…except it is really, really good and its name made no reference to pork…okay, so it is completely different. I just drank a bottle of Dark Cloud Munich-Style Dunkel Lager from Mother Earth Brewing out of Kinston North Carolina. This beer buds for me, it just does. It is a session beer with a modest 5.1% ABV so it won’t slow you down.
It pours out with an inch of thick creamy beige head. The color is a deep dark burnt-caramel brown. The nose is bready and malty with hints of chocolate. The carbonation is moderate which allows the malty chocolate flavors to come through. The flavor of Dark Cloud is true-to-style and would make any German brewer proud.
A lot of craft beer drinkers shy away from beers that don’t crush your face with hop bitterness beyond what you can even perceive or register on some exponential scale of ever-increasing alcoholic strength, and that’s too bad. Beer doesn’t have to be pigeonholed into simply the Triple IPA or the Imperial Stout. There is a vast array of full flavored modest gravity beers that will leave you impressed and your thirst for real beer flavor quenched. Mother Earth’s Dark Cloud is a beer that dares to be an absolutely wonderful beer without a submission into the X-Games for beer. Dark Cloud doesn’t require some cheesy ad slogan to tell you that it is a great beer. The beer speaks for itself. Make up your own mind. Try it for yourself.
ABV: 5.1%
Consumed: Mother Earth Globe Glass
Verdict: Buy a Case
