Another rainy Saturday, and not a stout for me this time. No, I found something that seemed more appropriate, at least in name – Fruit Jesus! The label looks very similar to those fruit portraits from some Renaissance painter whose name I can never recall. It’s not too surprising that this comes from Basqueland, they have a record of interesting labels and names. It would be quite a shock to find that it’s anything but a sour, and there’s no shock in store. Will it be a transcendent experience, or just an earthly delight? Better open up that can and find out.
It has that sort of gassy puff that a lot of sours do, sort of sulfury, but probably not what you’d get by opening a grave. It has a very juicy appearance, opaque, maybe a shade lighter than orange juice. The head is not abundant, but it is bright white and resistant. Other aromas start to make their way out, a little citrus and pineapple, something smoother too. I’m not sure if it’s mango or some other tropical fruit. It’s supposed to contain passion fruit, and peach, but I think I don’t really know what passion fruit tastes like. The peach might be the smooth part I think I can sense. The taste starts out on the sweeter side, sort of a fresh fruit salad. Then the sour creeps in, leaving a sort of champagne tickle feel along with a lingering aftertaste of sour candy. Not a bad beer at all, not too crazy for a sour, but I don’t know if it would wake the dead.
I saw it sitting on the shelf behind the bar, raising its glass, winking without eyelids. Burger Burger was not a beer to be rejected. I did have a moment’s hesitation seeing it was a sour, but it was also a milkshake inspired sour, and packed with fruit that make almost anything worth drinking – raspberries, black currants, even the strawberry. A black jacketed skeleton doesn’t seem like the most appetizing choice for the label, but the brewery, Fermenterarna from Sweden, might be making a reference to their ghostly lack of internet presence. There is a Facebook page, but their website doesn’t have much to speak of, except the posts from said Facebook page.
Slightly shocking color, although with the fruits listed I shouldn’t have been. It does give off a little puff of that fruity sour gas, along with some overripe banana. The top layer of flavor is pretty much strawberry milkshake, tangy fruit and fluffy creaminess, but there’s an undercurrent of banana and vanilla too. The raspberry and current are not immediately apparent but I suppose they add to the tanginess. On a relatively cold and wet evening, I might have preferred to pull out a stout that’s waiting in the wings, but there’s also a feeling of fun in a less common style and a creative can design. Also, skeletons totally go with windy, rainy weather. Early Halloween!
On the third day of Beermas I went and got for me Three frisky parrots A bottle but not two cans And more than half a liter of perry
I had some trouble deciding where the parrots should go, and in they end they got day three. There are three of them after all, not to mention I couldn’t find a better match. Maybe we could imagine them in French Polynesia. As befits the tropical label and the habitat of many parrots, this is a fruited sour, made by the geniuses at Basqueland. Parrot Head Punch, they call it. Actually, punch is a pretty seasonal drink, so in spite of being bright, light, and probably full of papaya, this might be a fitting beer for our season.
There’s the sulfur I often get from fruited sours, but the color is very happy and carefree. It’s pinkish with a hint of orange, looks like an expensive cocktail actually. Up close there’s a clear aroma of sesame, which I think is a first for me. It’s definitely sour and fruity, and I don’t think I detect any sesame seed taste. What fruit could it be? It has a dryness that some berries give you, and the snappy sour makes me think of cranberry. It’s a clean tasting sour, without any extra stickiness or candy-sour, and very light in body. It might be a good party beer, although for just having a drink in winter, it’s a little too unsubstantial for me. I know, picky, picky. Third day down!
As we roll into the month of vacations, it’s nice to look back as well as forward. Spain’s craft beer scene has just barely cleared a decade, and the field is still vibrant, changeable and volatile. Bars and stores come and go, breweries appear, expand, and sometimes get absorbed or simply vanish. As humans, we like to celebrate round numbers especially, those multiples of ten making the biggest emotional impact. Is the first decade the most exciting? It might be in most cases, actually, but the desired answer would probably be that the excitement will only grow as time goes on. San Frutos Siete, a Catarina Sour, shows the blending of fashion and tradition we still see in craft beer. Let’s see if it shows their typical quality as well.
Very, very light color, kind of a washed out gold. It has good head at first, but that goes down quickly. It’s extremely fruity in aroma, without the usual sulfur or swampiness that I get off of sours and some fruity beers. My first impression is mandarin, but there’s some passionfruit and maybe mango lurking in there too. Very tropical overall. There might be a hint of banana? Maybe that’s just psychological as I imagine a typical fruit basket, which tends to have some bananas. It’s not nearly as sweet and fruitpunchy as it seems when you get it in your mouth. The sour part of the style comes back with a vengeance, wiping out most other flavors you’re looking for. It even hangs around like a powerful sour candy, just waiting to take out anything you send after it. After the initial shock, I think some fruitiness does come out in the aftertaste, a little citrus and maybe some other tropical fruit I can’t describe properly. It has almost a ghostly feel, no weight at all, leaving all the heavy lifting to the flavor. It’s extremely refreshing, and not a bigass beer at a modest 4.6%. To sit in the shade, let the world pass by, and enjoy by itself, it’s a good choice. Happy Anniversary indeed.
There’s a fine brewery to my north where many a fine beer has been produced. Maybe not the most interesting beers, mostly varieties of pale ale, but all quite tasty. Of course they have branched out into sours, it’s the hot, hot summer, and we need that little snap of almost sugar with that cheek grabbing sour. The can is almost subdued, pastels but promising something exciting. Not a Boogaloo, actually, but maybe you’d want to get up and dance with all those blueberries, mangoes and currants flying around your mouth. Oh, you want to know what brewery is making this potion? Of course you do! It’s Península.
It’s kind of a fizzy grapefruit color, with a little head in the beginning, although it fizzles out. That sulfury aroma that many sours have is present, along with whiffs of astringent fruit. There’s a balance of sweet and sour in the taste, but definitely more weight on the sour. It has kind of a sour candy sort of flavor. While bubbly at first, the carbonation starts to wane with the minutes and the beer takes on the smoother texture, leaving only the sourness to smack your tongue around. It starts off pretty clean, many the fizz sweeps up on the way down, but as it gets flatter it gets thicker and heavier. Not to the point of unpleasantness or where you wouldn’t want to finish the glass, but it is a noticeable difference. Still, for those that are wary of taking on a black beer under a broiling sun, it might be a good option.
I have not traveled far and wide to beer fairs and festivals, a little to my chagrin. Well, I don’t like to drive, I don’t like crowds, and I’m not a good trip planner. So much easier to stay close to home – Beermad, La Ruta del Lúpulo, other assorted fairs and fests, there’s no lacking of opportunity in the area. For some reason, this seemed like the year to add Barcelona Beer Festival to the list. It’s supposed to be the biggest in Spain, with the most professional bent, in previous years they had up to 600 beers on the list.
So…it wasn’t quite as big as that. It was a little bigger than the last Beermad, but not too much. The professional area was bigger, but I don’t think there were many more stands and there certainly weren’t more toilets! That seems like poor planning to me. Also, the food just wasn’t as nice as from the food trucks at Beermad, although it was quite a bit cheaper. I was unsurprised to see all the info on the food stands in Catalán, and where there was Spanish it was lower down and a little smaller. They have to make their point. The best thing about BBF was that it was convenient to get to; I came in on the train and walked about 15 minutes down the street. Beermad is always a little bit out of the way for people from out-of-town, and even for people in town sometimes.
I didn’t want to waste time once inside, but I had just had a two hour train ride and a walk in the sun (it was kinda hot that weekend!) so I snapped up the first pick-me-up looking beer I saw, and it was Naparbier. A fruity apricot sour, something that sounded both soothing and like a good opener to more. It’s dark orange, rusty, with some potent alcohol fumes and a coating of old fruit. It really tastes like the liquor part of chocolate liqueurs, with the apricot being on the sour side and only a film of sweet on top. There’s a base of woodiness underneath, what you might expect from a barrel aged beer. I think I almost feel shreds of pulp as I drink, but it’s probably just the intensity of the flavor. It is a thick beer, though. While it starts out refreshing, it gets heavy if you don’t drink it fast, which is a little hard to do with the texture and alcohol feel. It’s a little stronger than I meant to start at, but definitely tasty.
Next I find something a little more local, Kom’s Amazonas NEIPA. Not quite ready to dive into stouts yet. It has a good color, very juicy looking. It turns out not to be as spiky as some in flavor, quite soft and creamy in fact, something of an easy drinking beer. The taste gives you the impression of natural, fresh squeezed orange juice. It’s a lovely NEIPA, happy on its own and probably not too bad with a little snack (was a little put off by some fishier odors by the food stands, so no lunch yet).
The time has come for a stout to take the stage, something bitter and black at last, so Petrolis seemed like the place to go. They had a Bidassoa Russian Imperial too, but I was told Mica Roble y Pino was more bitter, and that’s what I was hankering after. I don’t think it is that bitter, but it’s a barrel aged stout and that part is evident in the flavor. It’s even a bit peppery somehow. I was warned about a little wine taste coming out, and some does indeed, but I’ve had more obvious wine-beers. The combination of flavors is fairly heavy, but the beer itself is smooth and goes right down with little cling to the mouth. Well done, Mica!
Practically all the beers were Spanish and mostly from the north if not Cataluña (although Península was also there), but there was a stand with Polish beer on one end and French on the other. There must have been some buzz about the Polish beer because a line formed out of nowhere and snaked all the way around the corner, leaving me with little desire to stand around. The French beers looked like your typical craft offerings, IPAs and pale ales, and I thought after a barrel aged stout a hoppy IPA would hit the spot. They had Cambier IPA Mosaic/Idaho 7, which sounds like it ought to be bright enough to balance out the previous darkness. It is a perfectly acceptable IPA, good Mosaic flavor comes out, it’s not very bitter, mildly fruity, really a good pick-me-up after a disappointing pizza. The info on the stand recommended a Czech style pilsner as the beverage of choice, but I think the stronger tasting IPA is needed to make up for the disappointment. I was also treated to a taste of La Pirata’s barrel aged Black Block from a South African/Canadian couple at the table. They were on a Mediterranean cruise, spending the day in Barcelona and coincidentally saw the festival happening near their hotel. Hope you enjoyed the rest of your trip, Tim and Robin! Also, I hope I guessed right on the spelling. The Black Block was a delectable contrast to the IPA, even more of a comfort after underwhelming food.
I have time for more! There’s Althaia, who I remember from beer calendars. They have an interesting sounding smoked chilli stout, I ask if it’s very spicy and am told not very. Let’s try it out. There’s a smoky bacon aroma, good stout appearance. First flavor impression? Tabasco rauchbier. It has a good feel to it, very balanced in the smoke-earth-spice, but not much of a mealtime beer in my opinion. It’s a good little taster, actually perfect for the glass size at the festival. You get a good idea of what it is, but when it’s gone it’s just in time. It might actually be good with ice cream. I’ve had a bit to eat so now I feel like I might deserve dessert.
But I spend my last wristband tokens on Gecan Porter. This is a beer festival after all. It has a good dark color, but nothing in particular on the nose. It’s bready and toasty, more what you’d expect from a stout than a porter, although it’s not especially strong. Certainly not as fruity or smooth as I have come to expect from porters, but it is supposed to be a more traditional take. We can probably chalk it up to that.
And that was my Saturday in Barcelona Beer Festival. It could have been worse in so many ways, but it was a let-down from build-up on their website. Much more of a local festival than a national or international one. Next year what, Hamburg? Granada? I guess it depends on if I feel like flying or not.
With anticipation, the door opens on slot 24…and it’s a strong dark Belgian. Well, at least it’s dark. This collaboration between Guineu and Juguetes Perdidos might be fitting, in fact, for the holiday, since some Belgian beers do have a certain level of winter-appropriate spice. I’m cautiously hopeful about Pajaro Viudo. If it turns out to be a disappointment, I can say that I did have a chocolate stout earlier today (Thank you, Ossegg).
There’s a strong whiff of banana, and the beer looks thick and almost oily coming out. The head is tightly bubbled and deflates slowly. The flavor starts with bitter and Belgian level of sour, but not quite in the aftertaste you get an odd almost fishy sort of taste. Well, not fishy exactly, more like seaweed. It’s like a miso was added to the beer at some point. Going with the look, there’s a very full sensation that goes along with the liquid; it is smooth, but there’s a good amount of weight in it. The taste seems to contain itself, not expanding or deepening, leaving the drinker in a mood to sip and sip some more. It’s not that it’s lacking in taste, but it doesn’t have the extravagant explosion that I’ve come to expect from craft beers. Still, it’s probably good to back off from the excesses a little bit from time to time, and with Beermas starting tomorrow I don’t need to dull my sense of taste just yet!
Ah, I remember this one! It’s still not a black beer, but it’s something special – Oso Brewing’s Frutal III, a Berliner Weisse with strawberry and blackcurrant. You’d expect something on the sweet side, but the sour of the weisse really dominates. I got my first taste this summer at Gaztambirra, impressing, although not quite inspiring, my drinking/debating buddies.
It’s a little lighter than I remember, but I might be remembering a late-night beer a little unreliably. It does have the bitter-fruity aroma and the slightly pink head. The beer appears to be full of bubbles and somewhat cloudy. It is a bit wine-y again, with a sharp and bitter tanginess, like cheap wine and grapefruit juice mixed together. It also has a feeling of unsweetened cranberry juice. I don’t really detect any strawberry, but the blackcurrant might be there in the tang. The color is right for the season, but it’s a light and tickly beer, not what I look for an a dark near-winter night. I find my weisses are better suited to a summer evening. Well, looking forward I guess.
It isn’t a real holiday today, but it is the middle of the week and bookended by holidays. It’s almost a holiday by default, but some people take Monday and/or Friday to have long weekends and kind of begrudgingly go to work a single day of the week. Not everybody has the luxury of an “aqueduct”, as the Spanish refer to this extra-long weekend (a normal long weekend being a “bridge”). For a working day, we seem to have a normal working beer, Guineu’s Latitud 41 lager.
Activity begins as soon as the cap is unsealed, but there’s no foam overflow. The beer pours out with a sour-grain scent and a very fluffy head, settling into the glass with a very clear, slightly ruddy light lager color. The glass gives off a little metallic aroma too, making me wonder if the beer has gone off in the bottle. The flavor is at first strongly bitter and tinged with bread, a stronger flavor than I expect from a lager, but the aftertaste also has that metal and green bean bite. The beer tries to override that bit of weirdness, and it seems like it really is a fine lager, but the aftertaste is a little distracting.
Given family and vacation connections, I could not ignore Jakobsland’s I Can Make You Smile. A Florida weisse? It seems to make sense from a weather standpoint. Those weisses are sharp and refreshing, not the kind of beers that leave your mouth coated, suitable for additives you might feel like doing while you laze around on the beach or by the pool. Maybe it’s even a beer you could have in celebration of voting out a wildly unreasonable governor who will then not go on to be president. Maybe? Hopefully.
Similar in appearance to fruity lambics, a little tang in the aroma. Fluffy, resistant head, tinted pink. It has the tight dryness of a weisse, with a little sour only developing in the aftertaste. There’s kind of a fruity bed that the stiff alcohol rides in on, but it’s not very sweet at all. Wild fruit, just sweet enough to not punish you for eating it. It’s almost shockingly untropical for something labeled with Florida. The dryness wears off a little over time and rising temperature, but it stays clean and mouth cleansing more than anything else. I have to be honest, though, while the beer has a nostalgic Kool-Aid color, and it’s a perfectly fine modern weisse, a stout would always make me smile more.
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