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sour

beaufrutal

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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.

central spain

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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.

life in the sun

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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.

Supplier: Labirratorium

Price: €6.85

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