Can shared at Horizont. Nem készítettem jegyzeteket kóstoláskor, csak pontoztam.

After pastry stout, enter the pastry sour, yet another step further in the descent of craft beer – with its massive global popularity nowadays, I guess sour ale is just too sour for the craft beer drinking hipster masses and needed some sweetening to make it more accessible… A ridiculous idea if you ask me, but then I do admit that most of the pastry sours I had so far, were actually quite pleasant beers, reminiscent of bavarois, sugared fruit yoghurt, ricotta-based desserts and the like – a guilty pleasure indeed. This one from Nashville, Tennessee (thanks Johan ‘Parafix’ for the can) intends to evoke kakigori, a Japanese dessert comparable with sherbet, but sweetened with condensed milk – an interesting challenge. In order to achieve that goal, the brewers added lactose, strawberries, cherries, hibiscus, and sweetened coconut. Snow white, moussy, loose, thin head quickly opening and dissolving over a misty deep grenadine red ‘beer’. Aroma of red Haribo candy, grenadine, amaretto but without the alcohol, macaroon (or indeed dry coconut flakes), roselle, blood orange lemonade, granulated sugar in fruit yoghurt though the red fruits (cherry and strawberry) are hardly distinguishable here. Sour onset in a simple, superficial way, like the sour coating on sour Napoleon candy or ‘zure beertjes’ – a bit apple-like, initially sharp but melting away to reveal a sweet red candy core, which even sticks a bit to the teeth, weirdly; finely tingling carbonation, slender and supple, rather thinnish, cereally body (though hardly any real ‘malt taste’). Lemonade-like red ‘fruitiness’ dominates, but artificially so, with hardly any true strawberry or cherry (I guess extracts were used rather than real fruit), while the promised coconut effect remains very subtle. The ‘sour candy’ effect continues through the sweetness, with the hibiscus adding a flowery-herbal touch retronasally; the whole thing ends sour candy-like, in a rather straightforward way. Unusual, with the balance between sour and sweet, arguably one of the pitfalls in creating a good pastry sour, not very well achieved for me – the sourness feels very superficial and ‘added on top’ with some or other powder, while the sweetness below is equally superficial and red candy-like. Admittedly an interesting one, but I think the whole kakigori idea went a bit amiss here and can certainly be approached in a more convincing way…