Fruity beer season hits West Virginia

Seems like warm weather brings out the fruit, not only in the grocery stores and farm stands, but also in the beer. Fruity beer season is upon us.

The Peddler

I started thinking about fruity beer when I saw that Roobus Blackberry Wheat Beer from The Peddler brewpub in Huntington took home a gold medal in the beer competition at the WV Craft Beer Festival in Lewisburg recently. The juicy beer has proven quite popular and the gold medal was a nice pick-up for brewer Jay Fox. (Untappd: 3.74 out of 5 score on 56 ratings). Let’s hope we see more of Jay’s mastery of the sweet seed pods the rest of the year.

Big Timber

Since the release back in the winter of Alpenglow, that mind blowing wild cranberry gose, Big Timber Brewing has been demonstrating a mastery of fruited sours. More recently, folks have been showing a lot of love for Big Timber’s Key Lime Pie Gose. It has been out for about a month or so and has been much sought after. (Untappd: 3.83 out of 5 score on 212 ratings) Head brewer, Matt Kwasniewski says he’s getting ready to brew his summer fruited kettle sour, but he wasn’t quite ready at post time to say exactly what it would be. He’s thinking about a mixed berry-flavored sour, but we will just have to wait and see.

Bad Shepherd

This Thursday, Bad Shepherd brewer Ross Williams will release the new version of his milkshake/smoothie IPA, Dashcam Famous, this one with Red Raspberries. (The original Dashcam was brewed with blueberries. Untappd: 3.78 score on 148 ratings). Also expected to be tapped this week is a keg of Saison resting with salt-brine preserved lemons and fresh basil. Ross says he has been trying to capture that Italian lemon grove flavor for years. We will have to see if he succeeded with this one.

Parkersburg

At Parkersburg Brewing the Savant Blackberry Sage Saison returns for the spring and summer (Untapppd: 3.65 score on 252 ratings). It grabs you with a blackberry fruitiness and then follows up with a little savory sage. Nice combination. You may also be seeing around the market their brand new fruited Berliner Weisse variant: Bushwa Raspberry. Bushwa is noted for its more true-to-style, low ABV, while still giving plenty of refreshing flavor.

Morgantown

The guys at Morgantown Brewing haven’t met a fruit they couldn’t throw into a beer. Cody Cheesebrough and Chris DiFazio have been busy ramping up their kettle souring and barrel souring programs and that means more fruity stuff this spring and summer. On tap now are two good ones. Their Blood Orange Milkshake is a zero-bitterness IPA with blood oranges, vanilla beans, and lactose milk sugar (Untappd: 4.05 score on 69 ratings). Their Grand Daddy Purple (Untappd: 3.68 score on 67 ratings) is a Belgian-style sour smoothie brewed with 200 pounds of pomegranates, blueberries and red raspberries. Following that pair will be two more beauties — one a kettle sour and the other a barrel sour. For the Strawberry/Pink Guava Smoothie Sour, they have a kettle soured ale in a fermenter and finishing up this week. When it’s done, we’re going to condition it on pure strawberries and pink guava. They don’t have a name for this one yet, but it will be out in about two weeks. After that release, they are making a Barrel Soured Saison with Raspberries or Blueberries. For this one, they have been sitting on a couple of oaken red wine barrels full of farmhouse ale that they inherited when they took over the brewery over last year. Cody says it tastes phenomenal. With the base saison, he says they will blend a few kegs of it with fresh raspberries and a few kegs with blueberries, and rest them for a while. Release date will be sometime over the summer. Expect a bunch more tuttie-fruitties from them in the coming months

Abolitionist

Mike Vance, brewer at Abolitionist Ale Works in Charles Town, probably has made more fruited beers as a ratio of total beer brewed than anyone else in the state. He has some new ones out: Wild Blushing Bride, which is an American Wild Ale fruited with black currents; Wild Tangerine and Wild Orange, wild sours fruited with tangerine and orange; and Opequon Kriek, a barrel-aged sour brown ale conditioned with tart cherries, chocolate, and cinnamon sticks. And my mouth be watering for the release of Purple is the New Black–Season 3, a barrel-aged Farmhouse Ale with black raspberries and rosemary.

Fruity sours popularity rapidly growing

Wheat ales have always been popular for fruiting. Their light character benefits from the fruit additions and the bright colors are very attractive. Two tart wheat beer styles — Berliner Weisse and Gose — are today the most popular base beers for fruit additions in the U.S. Their tartness works very well with many sweeter fruit flavors.

Nationally, you see a ton of fruited brews on the market, even extending to IPAs, and stouts. Florida as been a hotbed of fruited kettle sours for the past five or six years. Traditional Belgian-style brewers of wood aged lambics and other traditional sour beers long ago discovered that fruit additions make them fun. The cherry-flavored Kriek and raspberry-flavored Framboise are the most popular.

Other breweries to check out around our region
In our region of the country, Virginia breweries such as The Answer Brewpub (Joose series), The Veil (Tastee series), and Aslin (lactose-added sours) have experimented with extra-fruited beers and even created new style categories so thick with fruit that they seem like slurry. Those super-fruited sours have also been done very well in Pittsburgh by Dancing Gnome (Underscore series), Hitchhiker (Subsurface series), and Grist House (Kapow Kandy series) and in Columbus/Marengo, Ohio by Hoof Hearted (Double Frooted series). We are lucky to have these super-good fruited sour brewers so close to WV.

For a totally new fruited beer experience, how about New Belgium’s Mural Agua Fresca Cerveza. It’s a brand new style of beer that reaches beyond traditional craft drinkers. Brewed with watermelon, lime, hibiscus, and agave, it is a collaboration with Primus, a Mexico City-based brewery. New Belgium says Mural is their joint homage to the classic agua fresca that is found pretty much everywhere in Mexico. Mural also pushes the boundaries of what a beer can be. We’ve found it light and refreshing at 4% ABV. Perfect summer beverage.