I'm continuing to try all the beers in the 12 Beers of Christmas Box from Brew Pigeon, and tonight's selection is the Fragile Festivus Christmas Ale from Lock 15 Brewing in Akron.

First, I'm a sucker for anything with the lamp from A Christmas Story on it. So it has that going for it out of the gate. And from the description -- brewed with ginger, cinnamon, and honey -- it sounds like it'll be very similar to Great Lakes Christmas Ale, which I hadn't tried until recently and it instantly became one of my favorite holiday beers.

The photo is too dark to do the color justice. It's a really rich coppery brown as opposed to the more dull reddish-brown in the photo.

On the nose I'm hit by the cinnamon more than anything. There's some nice malty scents coming out as well, but lots of cinnamon that's just shy of overpowering.

The cinnamon prominence comes out in the taste as well. I get a lot of the cinnamon flavor and that "dusty" feeling on the tongue that cinnamon has (at least for me), along with some sharpness from the ginger, and a nice dry finish.

It's ... not bad. For my taste they could dial the cinnamon back quite a bit. It did seem to mellow out some and the maltiness came out more as the beer warmed up a bit, and overall it was pretty enjoyable. Not as good to me as Great Lakes but not a bad beer, and I'm having a lot of fun trying all these different holiday beers from Ohio.