A fine, cheap lager (Carling Lager)

Member Name: shaneo632

Product:	Carling Lager
Date:	27/07/09 (25 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great sweet taste, cheap

Disadvantages: Some hate its taste apparently

A lot of people criticise Carling for being a very weak, mild tasting lager, but I must confess that I do drink it occasionally, and I find it to be a nice cheap alternative if you're on something of a budget. I drank a lot of this at University because it was available in very cheap crates - something like £8 for 12 cans I believe on the occasional Tesco offer.

First, make sure you have this served cold, because, before you criticise it, any beer or lager tastes horrible warm. A lot of people I think simply are snobbish because it's cheap, and being quite the beer conoisseur, I really don't think Carling deserves the reputation it unfortunately recieves. It's got a sweeter taste than a lot of lagers, which perhaps puts some people off, but considering how acerbic a lot of them are, I think that this is only a welcome thing.

If you're looking to get smashed, it's probably not the best beer to use, because it has a fair low ABV of 4.1%, but strangely despite its low % it is still a rather gassy beer, meaning if you're ploughing through them quite quickly, you're going to need to let out quite a few burps, I assure you.

In summary, Carling has a sweet taste (sweeter than its more reputed competitors like Stella and even Carlsberg), and is the "lower-tier" lager as seen by many people, simply because it's cheap (and some insist that it tastes horrible, but I think it's fine!). What doesn't help is that Carling used to have a certain cosmopolitan brand identity when it was associated with the Leeds and Reading festivals, but since they fell through, it's stuck in a bit of a PR rut, really.

Summary: A controversial but (in my opinion) tasty, budget beer