I noticed Carling lager available in cans at an LCBO store in Canada for a relatively inexpensive price of $2.05 CAD. It doesn’t seem to taste the same as the Carling I drank in the UK. Is it basically the same beer and the difference can be attributed to drinking it from the can rather than on draft? Or is it a completely different beer , sharing only the Carling lager name?
The Canadian version is more polite…
… is what someone was going to say inevitably.
It’s normal for branded versions of beers and lagers here to be made locally rather than imported. Guinness is also made here and people claimed to be able to tell the difference from the stuff which was imported from Ireland every week on a ship (something which has stopped now).
Before I was old enough to drink, we had commercials on tv in Washington DC with the following jingle–
“Hey, Mable. Black Label. Carling Black Label Beer.”
Carling was originally an American beer.Their brewery still stands (now an office building) on the shores of lake Cochituate in Natick, MA. As is the case with many beers, it can be made locally rather than imported.
Carling is actually a Canadian beer: http://www.carlingbeer.ca/Carling-Lineup.html. I drive past Carlingview Drive in Toronto on the way to my office, the current site of the Molson Coors brewery.
Does it really make a difference? It’s a crappy beer wherever you order it. 
In about 1992, the Carling name was resurrected by its owner (Molson’s) as a “value-priced” beer, costing slightly less than other Molson’s offerings. Labatt had introduced a similar product, called “Wildcat” at about the same time.
As such, Molson’s goal was to produce an inexpensively-made beer, that could be sold at lower prices to consumers. Under those conditions, I would doubt that Molson’s cared very much about Carling’s old recipe.
Thus, it is likely an entirely different beer, that shares only the Carling name.
Spoons
Former Ontario Beer Store Guy, who worked there during the introduction of Carling beer.
That jives with my memory of Carling going from an okay beer to, ‘holy shit that is awful’!