FROTH TALK: April 2008

For those who dismiss fruit beers as the love child of beer and wine coolers, it's time to look again.

Fruit is creeping into nearly every style of beer, from barley wines to bourbon-aged stouts. And a slew of breweries also are revisiting traditional fruit beer styles, such as framboise and kriek, Belgian-style lambics that are fermented with raspberries and sour cherries, respectively.

The reason, said Bryan Selders, Milton, Del.-based Dogfish Head lead brewer, is that brewers "like experimenting with exciting flavors"--and fruit's sweet and sour flavors can highlight almost any beer style.

"For a long time, beer drinkers thought [fruit beers] couldn't be taken seriously," he said. "But brewers like myself have tried to prove otherwise by making beers that are a beer first and add a fruit element to complement the beer."

The result is a bevy of distinct offerings, such as Dogfish Head's Olde School Barley wine, which Selders ferments with dates and figs that brighten barley wines' typical sharp bite with brown sugar notes and caramel maltiness. Selders also produces nearly a dozen other fruit beers, including Aprihop India Pale Ale, which he brews with apricots that marry sweetness with the beer's bitter hops, and Fort, brewed with raspberries.

Fruit also is showing up in strong, barrel-aged beers, said Barnaby Struve, lead brewer of Munster, Ind.-based Three Floyds Brewing Co. At the brewery's brewpub, Struve recently tapped a keg of the brewery's Behemoth Barleywine that he aged in a used whiskey barrel with a sour cherry puree. The cherries added tartness to the beer's caramel, brown sugar and citrus notes, and the barrel left a vanilla finish.

Some whiskey residue remains on the barrels, so "you need to use a strong beer with some backbone to stand up to the whiskey," Struve said. And while he has a "good idea" what the end product will be, each barrel ends up distinctive.

Because he only serves his barrel-aged fruit beers in his brewpub, that doesn't pose a problem. But it presents a challenge for breweries like Goose Island Brewery, which is considering a limited bottling of a rye-based Belgian saison-style beer aged in red-wine barrels with blackberries and wild Belgian yeasts. Employing used barrels may require blending the resulting product because the brewery wants to impart the barrel's character on the beer while also assuring that each beer will be similar to the next, said Wil Turner, a Goose Island brewer.

The fruit beer revival is not limited to idiosyncratic beers. A number of breweries, such as Chambly, Quebec-based Unibroue Inc., New Glarus, Wis.-based New Glarus Brewing Co. and Fort Collins, Colo.-based New Belgium Brewing Co., are reviving Belgian styles that incorporate fruit.

"There's a growing awareness among consumers of beer styles," said Jim Javenkoski, a Chicago-based La Brasserie Unibroue culinary attache, or beer sommelier. "And along with that are brewers turning to traditional styles for inspiration."

Unibroue brews two Belgian-inspired fruit beers: Ephemere, a white ale brewed with Granny Smith apples, and Quelque Chose, a kriek that is a blend of a younger and older beer.

Both beers pair well with a variety of foods, Javenkoski said. He suggested drinking Ephemere, which is sweet, bitter and tart, with pork tenderloin or French onion soup because they are salty and savory.

"Fruit beers are more acceptable or familiar to those just beginning to explore beers," he said. "They're drawn to the flavor profiles of acidity and sweetness since they're similar to wine."

Deb Carey, New Glarus' founder and president, suggested that her brewery's Raspberry Tart, a framboise, and Belgian Red, a kriek brewed with Door County cherries, are a "no-brainer" with turkey, or with dark, rich chocolate.

"There's just something about the berries' sweetness and the chocolate's bitterness that play off each other and are just spectacular," she said.

New Belgium also is putting a twist on traditional Belgian fruit beers. Grady Hull, the brewery's lead brewer, seeks to offer a variety of brews with such offerings as Frambozen, a brown ale fermented with raspberries, and Transatlantic, a kriek that is a blend of a Belgian cherry lambic and the brewery's own young beer.

"When fruit beers first came out, it seemed like they were almost always raspberry wheat beers that were light and drinkable," he said. "But it's getting harder for that label to stick forever."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/food/foodanddrink/sns-fddrink1-wk2,0,117658.story

So they other day I am in the store buying a friend a 6 pack of some gay ass wheat beer, call me a nice guy but I haven't felt that gay in a while. Well when the guy that was working at the store saw my ID he said words that I have been waiting to hear since I moved to this shit hole they call Florida. He said " Man I am so glad that they finally started getting Sweetwater in Florida." Well I freaked and I said WHAT!, WHERE? and such....and his reply was simply "About 2 hours a way we are still trying to figure out how to get it shipped down here." My first thought other than how excited I would be if I were to drink a Sweetwater IPA in this shit hole they call Florida and my second was how hard can it be to figure out how to ship something just an hour or so south? Needless to say I was liking this guy because he was sharing the good news with me until he said: " 420 is the best beer ever." I laughed at him and told him Good Day, dumb ass.

So the good news is that maybe Sweetwater will make my stay down here a lot nicer especially when it gets hot....and the bad news is that this shit hole they call Florida can't figure out how to put cases of "amazingness" in a box and ship it to a store.