On Your Mark Blonde

The beer

Clean, and finished before it develops. Pale malt and cracker lead the nose, with only a light citrus edge. The palate follows in the same quiet key: soft grain, lemon, mild sweetness, bitterness kept low. The lemon never sharpens the beer. The sweetness never climbs. What you taste is a blonde doing an ordinary job, and doing it without a fault you can name.

The finish is the limit. Short, clean, lightly bready — cracker rather than toast, then gone. Mouthfeel stays light. There is no second flavor waiting under the malt, and there does not need to be one for the glass to make sense. The beer is consistent from sniff to last sip: pale grain, a little lemon, sweetness that stays mild, bitterness that never asserts itself. That consistency is the virtue. It is also why the glass does not linger in memory once the can is down.

Seventy-seven sits on that straightforwardness. It is a clean nonalcoholic blonde, pale malt and lemon, not a beer you order because it is the interesting one. Serve it cold. Expect cracker, a little citrus, and a short bready close, and the pour matches the expectation exactly.