feste_sylvain

Berliners have been putting fruit juice in beer for, oh, a good long time. It took some tinkering, but many microbreweries have settled on the notion of a filtered wheat beer as a base for their fruit juices.

In general, beers with fruit juice should be served chilled (cold, even) on hot days. They work as sidekicks to barbecues.

Wachusett Blueberry is a prevalent example of that here in Massachusetts. This is a right decent quaff with enough blueberry to notice, but not so much that you're tempted to pour it on ice cream.

Sam Adams Cherry Wheat is actually brewed with cherries, instead of just having cherry juice added after the fact. This works in all sorts of hot weather.

The delightful wren13 brought me back a couple of beers from her recent excursions. Ithaca Beer Co. makes an Apricot Wheat which unfortunately reminded me of some peach wine spritzers on first taste. Fortunately, it wound up tasting more like beer and less like spritz as the bottle went on; unfortunately, the brewers were being too gracious when they tried to describe this as having a "hint" of apricot. It is quite obvious, I'm afraid. But if you don't tend to like hops, you may well like this. (hammercock has pointed out that she likes things like cherry lambics exactly because they don't taste like beer.)

But the other beer that wren13 brought me (bless her!) was Abita's Purple Haze, which is a raspberry wheat "brew". (I don't know why they uniformly call their works "brews" instead of "beers"; maybe that carries the wrong cachet down in Louisiana.) This is a stronger-flavored wheat beer in the first place, rather than the nearly-transparent forms used by Wachusett and Ithaca. As a result, if the berry concentration is higher than a "hint", the beer doesn't fall down underneath it. I like this one much better.

It's summer. It's hot. Stouts and porters are pretty much out of the question. We can enjoy the fruity beers for a few months, until the pumpkin ales of autumn put a lid on it.