It's been some time since I've cracked open a bottle of Icehouse. I know I tried the beer when it first came out in the nineties, since I try every new beer I stumble across. Sometimes literally. The brand was introduced during the "ice beer" craze, and as a result its 5.5% by volume alcohol content is slightly higher than most domestic mass market beers. When it came out, I thought it was ok for what it was intended to be, though not really my cup of tea (or beer for that matter). The beer is listed as being made by the "Plank Road Brewery", which does not exist but was Frederic Miller's original brewery back in the nineteenth century. Interestingly, Miller marketed a beer called Plank Road back in the eighties which was actually quite good.

Today while I was beer hunting up in Massachusetts, I saw something that caught my eye: a 16 ounce bottle of Icehouse. Why did this catch my eye? The bottle had red print on yellow background that screamed NEW! UNBREAKABLE PLASTIC BOTTLE! Interesting. What the heck I figured, it's only $1.25, I'm curious to see how plastic affects the taste, and I can make back most of the cost writing a review of the beer for Epinions. So I bought it.

Miller has been test marketing plastic packaging for years, and it appears the tests were successful. Anheuser Busch has been looking into plastic too; Bass, Young's, and German and Canadian brewers have also experimented with the notion. Plastic is lighter than glass and thus cheaper to ship, it doesn't break like glass or dent like aluminum, and is considered to be preferable for sporting events, boating, and the like.

Now the beer itself. Pale in color with a short lived spritzy head and soft malt nose, this is a quenching brew but has little going on in the way of flavor. The palate has a touch of delicate malt and is very smooth and drinkable with a touch of adjunct flavor. The finish is clean and fairly balanced, leaning slightly to the sweet end of the spectrum. All this would lead it to be suitable for serving ice cold on a very hot summer day. I must admit that for me though the bottle was more interesting than the brew, but your mileage may vary.

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