Raspberry Berliner weisse has become a familiar style of beer to many of us; after all, it’s been around the Aussie scene for more than a decade now*, and has been found on shelves in mainstream bottleshops for more than half of that time.
But this is not your stock standard raspberry Berliner weisse.
For their third and final Summer of Sour beer this season, Aether have brought out this little red funk monster. The base beer was fermented with souring yeasts, then spent nine months in French oak with Brettanomyces doing its thing. No raspberries yet. At the end of that time, the brewers blended in a fresh batch of sour-fermented Berliner weisse full of Tasmanian raspberries.
The final result is a lot of funk on the nose and a lot of funk in the mouth. There’s also plenty of citric acid and a touch of acetic, making for a wild ride. It gave me the impression of a sour apple cider: the small batch kind that’s too sour for Dan Murphy’s.
But overlaying all of this is, of course, the raspberry. As well as bringing their glorious colour, the raspberries bring their tartness and a slight impression of their syrupy sweetness (though I daresay all the actual sugars are long gone). Bretty barnyard notes rush in to join them in the finish, where hay and horse blanket are welcome and subtlety is not.
Mick Wüst
*Boatrocker first released Miss Pinky in 2013… I can’t imagine there were too many floating around before that.
Published January 31, 2024 2024-01-31 00:00:00
