The movie means no time to really experiment with beer tonight. Well, the movie and the fact that we drank The Outback out of Newcastle Brown.
However, one of my Australian coworkers picked up a couple of beer for me (at Julio’s) while searching for some Czech beer that’s hard to get in Australia, and I did manage to sneak one of them in tonight.
This is another crack at the idea of a raspberry porter, this time from Southern Tier. While I wasn’t tremendously thrilled last time, I was suprisingly impressed with Southern Tier’s crème brûlée Imperial Milk Stout earlier this year, so why not give it a shot?
This one pours pretty light for a porter–it looks almost the same colour as the Wet Hops ale from last night, more red-brown than black by a good measure. It’s more translucent than I expect from a porter as well. The site says it has a lovely head, but apparently I poured it wrong, since I barely got one at all.
There’s no mistaking the smells here–this smell is raspberry all the way. My first thought actually was that it smells like one of those fancy fruit-flavoured ice teas more than a beer.
The beer is very light in the mouth–very quaffable, and easy to drink. There’s a raspberry flavour immediately–a kind of dilute raspberry Kool Aid flavour. That sounds harsher than I mean it too–it actually reminds me a lot of Kawartha Lake Brewing’s Raspberry Wheat, which is a fine beverage to kill your thirst, in two long swallows, on a hot summer day.
What it doesn’t remind me of at all, though, is a porter. This isn’t a beer that would keep street and river porters going through a hard day.
So, another one I probably won’t be buying another bottle of.
