"We have taken the remaining puréed fruit from recent projects, and created a unique blend of flavours with a few of our favourite things."
As someone who hates food waste, I am very on board with this approach.
Ready Made Fruited Sour Ale pours… well, not quite red, but almost red. Kind of like watered-down cola, or when a creek has been stained that deep brown colour by tea trees in the local area. Or maybe I’m overcomplicating this, and I should just stick with "red-adjacent".
As for the actual fruit lineup… are you ready? It contains cherry, blueberry, strawberry, rhubarb, pomegranate, pineapple, passionfruit, orange, all smoothed out with a lick of lactose. Yikes.
I got a whole lot of mixed berry character up front, with some pineapple bite and cherry sweetness as the beer lingered on the palate. There’s a sweet balance to the acidic sour, but there’s no danger of moving into pastry sour territory. The more I drank, the less I felt hit on all sides by fruit, and the more the beer settled into a deep red berry sourness – almost like a Flanders red.
There’s a glass-and-a-half of fruit in every glass.
Which makes my job harder when we get to Stay Tuned DDH Mosaic NEIPA, because I can hardly call it "fruity", can I?
Obviously a very different kind of beer, but Stay Tuned is indeed full of fruit character, this time from Mosaic hops blasting their multi-layered goodness. It looks like orange paint in the glass, but smells much better: heaps of orange and mandarin peel waft up from the surface of the beer, with a little mango in there for good measure. The citrus allows some fresh tropical and pine notes in once you start drinking, with a sprinkle of freshly cut grass on the finish.
With all the Mosaic loaded in, I guess you could say there’s a glass-and-a-half of hops in every glass… maybe?
Sigh. I’ve really backed myself into a corner, and now the only way to get myself out is to end in the middle of a
Mick Wü
Published October 13, 2023 2023-10-13 00:00:00
