Fruit Beer Week: Melbourn Brothers Strawberry (Re-review)
Melbourn Brothers beers hail from England and they offer three varieties of fruit beers, all spontaneously fermented—which technically qualifies them as Lambics. (Though I believe the fruit is added post-fermentation in the form of concentrate or syrup.) Back in 2006 I reviewed their Strawberry beer, and this is what I had to say about it:
Appearance: Poured into a Pilsner glass, it resembles a slightly dark rose champagne, pink and orange. Faint pink head, very thick and creamy.
Smell: Strawberries! Very sweet. Champagne again, hardly any beer character.
Taste: Strawberry sweet and a bit tart, a nice combination. Similar to Lindemans Framboise. A hint of malt in the background, but no hops.
Mouthfeel: Sparkly, on the thin side, thinner than a lambic, more like (you guessed it) champagne. Seems appropriate.
This is actually quite a fruity “non-beer” beer, one that people who ordinarily don’t like beer (like my wife) will enjoy. The beers (the other two are Apricot and Cherry) are imported by Merchant du Vin, so you should be able to find it easily enough at a good beer outlet (at least, on the West Coast, I think). Plus, it’s a very easy-drinking session beer with only 3.4% alcohol by volume.
On BeerAdvocate, it scores an overall grade of B. On RateBeer, it scores 3.32 out of 5, and is in their 84th overall percentile.