A big family issue (resolved happily, don’t worry) kept me from planning out some grill on Saturday. And I need to slog through the beers that have been to me for my comment, including three different summer fruit beers sent by Spoetzel Brewery in Shiner Texas, which is known to all simply as Shiner. So I’m just hitting one each when and where I can, and if it ends up in from of some charring frankfurters Sunday evening, all the better.
Shiner Strawberry Blonde is part of their Brewer’s Pride Series. Like all the fruit beers I have received, it was made with Texas-grown fruits, in this case, strawberries from Poteet, TX. The berries are brewed with pale ale and wheat malts.
The bottle offers a nice whiff of strawberry juice right under the cap. It pours a slightly rosy body under a very fizzy head that settles down like a soda pop. The taste, though, points up a problem I have had with any “Strawberry Blonde” beer, going back to the one from Pete’s Wicked Ale. That is, that strawberry flavors seem to need to stand on their own, and don’t always play well with beer malts. This beer works around the issue by, it seems, keeping the hop load low, and perhaps using a lighter malt bill so that it finishes drier, to avoid too much sweetness. It’s still kind of hard to work the two tastes together on the palate until after the first couple of sips, but then it can work well in combination.
Ruby Redbird has been out for a couple of years as a seasonal. It lists Texas Ruby Red grapefruit juice and (non-Texas) ginger among its ingredients. It pours a brown-orange with another fizzy soda head. The nose brings up slight notes of ginger with grapefruit coming on the side. The taste does have more grapefruit than the nose and this is the sweeter kind of grapefruit, and the ginger adds the egde of Ginger Chews that actually take the place of the hops. Whether any grapefruit juice was actually fermented or just added in the secondary is not answered, but this is certainly not a radler with beer and juice blended, as its 4.01% abv shows. Now I’m wondering with a mix of Ginder Ale and Squirt would taste like as a mixer.
I’m popping the third beer on Monday, after I finally got around to assembling a portable charcoal grill Mrs. Naut got me for my birthday. So I was able to work in a grill, after all.
Prickly Pear was first released in 2012 as the third in Shiner’s Brewer’s Pride Craft Brew Series, and is now another summer seasonal. It has the distinction of using juice from the prickly pear cactus, on top of Citra and US Golding hops. Seems prickly pear has been used in many beers and ciders, including one from 5 Rabbit and by Flossmoor Station.
I should have had a picture of this one in a glass, but I let my tablet run down its battery tonight, so we’ll just have to depend on my description. Pours another fizzy head, but it does stick around longer than the soda pop heads of the other two beers. The smell shows some fruit sweetness. The smell has a fruity note, almost like a perfume, in fact. The taste brings in that perfumey fruit with a very slight tartness on the back of the throat. This may go well as a dessert beer; although most such beers are pretty strong, this 4.9% abv brew would suit a lighter palate.
All three of these beers are currently available in the Chicago area.
