Sample at Brewskival 2023, Helsingborg 11/08/2023 Sour but with some honey and pineapple sweetness coming in, medium body, peated smoked finish, not working for me. --- Beer merged from original tick of Smokey Islands on 26 Mar 2025 at 06:45 - Score: 6. Original review text: Sour but with some honey and pineapple sweetness coming in, medium body, peated smoked finish,not working for me.

Bottle. Much discussed already and I had this before at a tasting but now sitting down with a whole bottle too myself at home. Bit hazy amber with short lasting head. Iodine, pear indeed but very on the iodine side, huge ginger, spicy ginger, sour grains, classic Alvinne sourness. I don’t get the honey and pineapple not whisky, mostly the base beer with ginger juice and iodine. Yeah it’s weird and out of control, but also it’s not bad at all and I like it in a weird way.

Elaborated version of Alvinne's basic sour ale Phi, aged on peated whisky barrels and flavoured with ginger juice and pineapple - a bizarre combination to say the least. Comes from a steinie bottle with, oddly, a more 'vibrant' label than the classic Alvinne label style - I guess the result of the collab with Gili Drinks in Mechelen has something to do with that. Frothy, off-white, irregular, medium sized but quickly breaking and dissolving head eventually vanishing into nothing, misty peach blonde robe with slightly ruddy tinge. Strong aroma with very dominant ginger juice upfront (spicy but also very soapy to the point of being almost chemical), iodine tincture rather than real peat in this case (alas), far less pineapple (hardly noticeable even), Moscow Mule, plywood, crabapple, cleaning agent (the ginger connecting all too intimately with the iodine, I'm afraid), sourdough, pickled peaches, green tea, camphor, redcurrant, wax candles. Fruity, tart onset, crisp and a bit puckering and astringent, unripe plum, redcurrant and wild apple effects reinforced by an underlying lactic acidity (sour yoghurt); soft carbonation, rounded body. Bready core with a very slight caramelized edge, dried by the overall sourness but also by woody tannins and of course the peaty element, which effectuates a somewhat 'dusty' and astringent feel - with that iodine element returning retronasally and lingering there. The ginger at last appears less dominant than I was fearing, but the whole final stage of this beer's flavour 'parcours' is still filled to the brim with it, its soapiness accentuating the peat and its spiciness accentuating the acidity. Pineapple again remains very much in the background, basically contributing only to the sourness of this beer but unable to push through its sweet juiciness in the way the smoked pineapple Alvinne beer from years ago did. Indeed I think using smoked pineapple would have been a better option here than using peated whisky barrels - and why not add smoked ginger while you are at it... I am always very cautious when it comes to ginger in beer and here it dominates too much for my personal liking; I can, however, appreciate a peaty aspect in certain beers from time to time, but only if the peat feels like actual peat and less like the iodine tincture my grandmother put on my wounds when I was a child and got hurt somewhere in her garden. As much as I admire Alvinne for the countless masterpieces they have created throughout the years, experimenting like they do always inherently holds a risk of missing the goal, and in this case the combo of flavours, though bold and intense, does not work, at least not for me. Less ginger and more pineapple could possibly bring improvement... Have a point for audacity and originality, though.

Fat på Brewskival 2023. Guldfärgad, lätt disig, vit krona. Ananas, ingefära, torv, rökighet som smyger sig på och sen helt dominerar. Ingen vidare större kropp, så här blir stökigt.