Wander Beyond: Paddle Raspberry Gose (England: Gose: 4.3% ABV)
Visual: Reddened apricot. Moderate creamy off white head.
Nose; Tart, fresh raspberry. Very clean. Light grapes and twigs. Raspberry yogurt underneath. Soft apricot.
Body: Soft raspberry. Slight salt to white bread. Slightly thick body. Chalk touch. Vanilla. Slight rocks. Apricot. Wet socks. Vanilla yogurt.
Finish: Light raspberry. Light strawberry. Light chalk dryness. Stale white bread. Lightly creamy.
Conclusion: Well, the aroma on this sure sells the raspberry gose gimmick. It is frankly just plain, fresh raspberry cleanly done in a raspberry cooler kind of way backed by slightly creamier raspberry yogurt notes. Very simple, very fresh – maybe a few apricot hints in there, but it lead me to expect the body would be similar – a very raspberry kind of beer.
So, well, it wasn’t that.
The body does have a nice touch of raspberry that heads out into join strawberry notes in the finish but it is built around a core of, well, fairly vanilla yogurt with slight salt and touches of what people tend to call the “sweaty sock” gose taste.
It is thick textured – especially for a gose, thick in a way that I would call creamy except it lacks the accompanying flavor you would expect from such a descriptor. The thickness does not manage to banish the very neutral flavor of this beer though, waiting until the finish where it finally moves out of the way and lets the tarter notes play again.
This feels like a great mouthfeel that manages to kneecap the flavor the aroma promised, producing an empty weight of a beer that only occasionally has the fruit rising up to pay off the promise it made early on.
A sub optimal beer.
Background: Wader Beyond is a new brewery on me but their bright and colourful illustrated can caught me eye, so I decided to give them a go. They have here tried their hand at a gose – a risky one to use an introduction to a new Brewery as they can vary so much, but I felt like it was gose time again. Gose is a German style that nearly died out – a lightly salted wheat beer that if often just slightly soured. This, like a lot of the new interpretations, is made with fruit, raspberry in this case. I was going to see Machine Head live shortly after this, so slammed on some of their tunes as warm up for the big gig.
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