Style: Fruit/Vegetable Ale
5.3% ABV
Color: Hazy golden, 6.4 SRM
Original Gravity: 13.2° Plato
IBUs: 23
Malt Varieties: Samuel Adams two-row pale malt blend, Munich 10, and malted wheat
Hop Variety: Hallertau Mittelfrueh Noble hops
Yeast Strain: Samuel Adams ale yeast
Special Ingredient: cherries, honey
This bottle screams mass production. You can look at my review of Samuel Adams Summer Ale (provide link) if you need my break down of all Sam Adams labels, but to get to the basics it is far too crowded with text, the fonts are kind of shitty, and it feels like a soda can or something. This label is not worthy of anything in my book.
The beer pours a surprisingly yellow with only a slight oranging to suggest the cherries. I sits in the glass as a murky gold with some nice bubbles of carbonation. The beer pours with a nice white head but this mellows down into just a scrim, though it does regenerate when agitated. Lacing for this beer is negligible. The beer smells like cherry coke. The cherry is far too sweet and cloying for natural cherries, but reminds me of a maraschino cherry, which is a nice smell. I’m not expecting this to be the most natural beer, but the candied smell is definitely intriguing. The malt body, hops, and yeast are all overpowered by the cherries except for the smallest ghost of a suggestion of biscuitiness. The beer tastes like a bready cherry cola. The aftertaste is well built with buttery biscuit, a suggestion of the wheat spice/funk, and only a faint cherry sweet that goes slightly vegetal. The initial sip, however, was heavy with sweet cherries, though the very initial taste is surprisingly heavy with the biscuit malts, but the cherries quickly wash them away to suggest cherry cola. Mouthfeel is a little prickly with the carbonation, leaving a slight tingle, but thick and creamy in the initial sip which that mellows into a watery feeling. The mouth is left with the cloying feel of sweet cherries but little of the flavor and a slight dry burn on the back of the tongue which tingles beneath the light trickle of saliva your mouth works up. Overall this is a strange beer. Its smell and flavor are actually quite good, but the mouthfeel really pulls it back in scoring. It is actually quite good for what the company was going for, as this is a refreshing and tasty fruit beer that is easily mass produced. I compare this more to a cherry cola than to a beer, and I really wouldn’t drink a lot of these due to their cloying nature but one on a hot summer day is not a bad thing to sip when you are looking for something a little different.
3.5/5
Beer in my Belly 