With my schedule finally opening up a little, I can start to clear my backlog of sotry ideas and beer reviews. Here’s one that I made a video for back in April, shooting outside with my tablet for the first time. I only now got to finish editing it and posting to YouTube. But I can still suggest this as a good beer for the Labor Day weekend.
21st Amendment Brewing opened in 2000 in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood, a few blocks from the new stadium for the San Franscisco Giants. Founders Nico Freccia and Shaun O’Sullivan were typical craft beer fans who felt that SF’s craft scene was still lacking at the time, and opened their own brewpub to help the situation. When they went into production brewing, they went with packaging in cans, the form in which their beers arrived in the Chicago market this spring.
Among their other beers found in our area is Down to Earth, a session IPA, and Brew Free or Die, a more standard India Pale Ale, and Back In Black, a Black IPA. Their current extreme beer is Hop Crisis, an Imperial IPA with 9.7% abv and 94 IBUs.
The more unusual offering from “21A,” if I may be so familiar, is Hell or High Watermelon Wheat, an American Wheat beer with watermelon added to the secondary fermentation stage. Not a lot of brewers attempt to put watermelon in their beers. Its flavor is kind of light and can get lost in any malt profile heavier than a light wheat or blonde ale. But they’ve had a few years to practice before bringing this beer to our town, and it seems to be working.
Right off, the aroma does not offer much to thrill, just a base malty smell that has some trouble making itself known. The beer body is hazy gold, matching an American wheat style, with a puffy head that kicks up easily. The taste is where there’s a difference: a milder version of a zesty wheat malt beer, but there it is, that background of Watermelon juice. Juice flavor is use a little bit sour; not like a Jolly Rancher, but, well, more like a slice of Watermelon that’s sat outside for an hour. It could also be aided by the slight spiciness that wheat malt adds to some beers, too. It’s a lighter, summer beer that offers something different, and considering how “thin” the actual flavor of watermelon is, they’ve actually managed to make this stand out as one of the few successful production versions of the rare “Watermelon beer.”
Hell or High Watermelon Wheat is 21st Amendment’s summer seasonal, so it may not be around much longer. A good choice for Labor Day grilling and any outdoor tailgating that doesn’t involve a jacket.
Beer for this review was purchased by me.
