Lab44 Limited Edition - Dutch Grape Ale
Brouwerij Hoop in Zaandijk, Noord-Holland, Netherlands 🇳🇱
Fruit Beer - Grape Ale Special Out of Production|
Score
6.67
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Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 4 | Overall - 7.5
Intended as a hybrid between wine and beer, this one is fermented with part beer wort and part Sauvignon Gris wine must - and fermentation has apparently been done by a kveik yeast and a champagne yeast. Thanks Joeri for sharing. Snow white, loosely knit, thinnish, open, dissipating head on a lightly hazy very pale straw blonde beer - actually hardly 'blonde' anymore and showing about the same hue as a Sauvignon Blanc wine. Aroma of indeed Sauvignon grape must and white wine, green gooseberries, cava that has been exposed to air for a day, raw cucumber, green apple peel, lemon zest, some unfortunate DMS (cooked broccoli), banana peel, grass, soap. Fruity onset, sweetish with very obvious white grape presence, hints of green apple and banana peel too, softish carb, slick and bit vinous, but very slender body; fruity, grapey sourishness underneath as in, indeed, white wine must, Sauvignon Gris but a sweeter, almost Riesling-like aspect as well, hintsof cooked rhubarb and raw cucumber, some pleasant minerality, fruit-sourish finish with some grape skin tannins adding a dryish touch but no hop bitterness. Very slender, lean beer, would be a highly elegant 'apéritif' if the DMS had not been there. Still, if this off-flavour can be eliminated, what you end up is indeed a quite sophisticated wine-beer-hybrid, though I had many more complex and memorable ones than this; in any case more wine-forward than many others, with a very 'repressed' beeriness. Still a very interesting offering from a brewery I haven't encountered in years - I had no idea they were doing this kind of experiments, something I would like to investigate further when given the opportunity.