I'll be honest with you: when I received samples of Noodledoof's Raspberry Cacao Sour, I felt it was an unlikely combo and went in with some trepidation. Little did I know what lay just around the corner from the same brewery and a beer also bearing the name "sour"...
What's more, the trepidation was ill-placed. Raspberry Cacao Sour pours like a Bellini with its soft peachy-pink haze and opens with a really nice, tart 'n' quenching acidity from the off. What's most interesting is that the raspberries provide only part of the fruity character; thanks to the souring elements, there's plums and zesty orange citrus on the nose too, while the cacao provides the faintest of soft chocolate layers in the background.
Now, while that beer turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable, puckering sour with its adjuncts served with subtlety, there's little subtle about Nitro Blackberry Jam Milkshake Sour, one of three nitro-injected releases from the Koroit brewers this autumn. It stops just short of looking like a smoothie in your glass – more a heavily-fruited kombucha, perhaps – while the aromas are akin to blackberry fool put through a blender: fruit smothered in vanilla cream with a hint of berry tang and the faintest of bitterness. A party beer to get your warmed up for GABS.
James Smith
Published May 3, 2023 2023-05-03 00:00:00