Wild Beer Co: Somerset Wild (England: Sour Ale: 5% ABV)
Visual: Cloudy lemon juice. Froths up frantically in white but then the head vanishes.
Nose: Peanuts. Acidic apple. Hazelnuts. Light dried fruit. Orange crème centres of choc orange.
Body: Cider and apple pie. Very tart. Vanilla sweetness. Sweet pastry. Peanuts and funky yeast, Lemon juice.
Finish: Malt choc orange? Fresh feel. Apples. Peanuts.
Conclusion: Ok, before I go any further, may I address the elephant in the room. Choc orange? Really? Am I mad? In an apple based sour beer? Really? I really thought twice about noting it down, as it seems so odd, but my aim with these reviews is honesty no matter what, so I cannot lie, when I held this beer on my tongue for a while, yeah, light choc orange came out.
That was a lot of commas.
For once I am even sure that I wasn’t just over thinking the beer. You see, when I popped the cap on this bad boy it frothed up massively immediately, resulting in me slamming my mouth around the bottle to catch the spray. So I caught a mouthful of frothing beer, and in that moment as I tried to swivel my head around to move the bottle from half way down my gullet to pouring into the glass I had two thoughts 1) Damn that is sharp an 2) Choc orange? Are you kidding me?
Anyway, the sharpness became much more manageable a few sips in. I can see how people could find this beers sharpness a bit much, but I considered it safely in what I would call “The comfort zone”.
Once you have acclimatised you get a lot of lambic like characteristics, nuttiness, a tart lemon acidity and a funky yeast feel. Very apple like, kind of tart cider apple and sweet apple pie mix…and yes occasionally choc orange comes out. The hell?
It is very refreshing, very nice balance of sweet to acidity and very much a cider beer ( I seem to say that a lot about Wild Beer Co beers). It falls into a similar beer bracket as sourdough, and as a summer session refresher that beer wins for me. It gives more for a lower abv. This does however have a more definable flavor in its apple styling, so maybe a good one to throw into the mix in between.
So an apple pie lambic of a beer…and yes, again, occasionally choc orange ( I may be over emphasising that…it is a tiny element, I just find it so odd and unexpected). Not much more or less than that, but that is enough for me to enjoy. As always, I hope you can decide for yourself from the ramblings.
Background: So I drank this as the EU election results came in. Yes that was a while back. It took me a while to recover. FUCKING FUCK FUCKITTY FUCK FUCK THIS FUCKING COUNTRY. For people who don’t know, we decided to put a chunk of our countries vote to the group of anti immigration scaremongering, nationalistic arseholes called UKIP. Half the people seem to claim they were doing it as protest votes, which makes you wonder why they ignored all the harmless groups, and instead “Protest voted” for a group that is packed to the gills with racist, homophobic, transphobic and anti Islam, bigoted idiots. It’s almost like they are lying about their reasons to make it more socially acceptable. I was less than happy to say the least.
Deep breath. Ok soapbox over, but yeah, this may have affected my review opinion slightly as I needed cheering up. Also I listened to a cool new punk band called Brassick during this; the choice of punk was probably not a coincidence. Anyway, check Brassick out they are really good – especially if you can see them live. Oh the beer? Yeah, this is a spontaneously fermented sour beer, from the awesome guys at Wild Beer Co. I head heard mixed reports, some saying it was way too sour, some saying it was awesome, but it never sounded boring.
