This week we launch our first ever Smoothie Sour style beer, and we have really kicked things off with a bang!
Smoothie Sours refer to a relatively recent style of beer that first emerged from some adventurous American breweries. The main goal of this beer style is to emulate a fruit smoothie as closely as possible. That means a final product that is a little sweet, a little sour, and very VERY fruity. As the style has evolved brewers have concocted outrageous flavour combinations, utilising ingredients like coconut, marshmallows, cream cheese, crumbled up biscuits, and of course every kind of fruit you can name.
One of the signature techniques of this style of beer is to add fruit to a fully fermented beer, and then immediately package it. This differs greatly from traditional fruit beers where the fruit is added during the fermentation process. This technique allows the fruit sugars to be fermented by the yeast, which makes the beer shelf stable and unlikely to continue to ferment after packaging. When one choose to not ferment the fruit, then you need to make the beer stable by pasteurising it. This inactivates any yeast cells that could ferment the fruit in the package, and it also means the beer carries the ripe, sweet flavour of fresh fruit.
For our inaugural try at this extreme beer style, we loaded up our base beer with 575kg of raspberry puree, plus a dash of lactose for sweetness, and shot of vanilla to accent the creamy flavours. In the end, 40% of each can of beer is made up of raspberry puree. So it will come as no surprise that this beer tastes exactly like a raspberry smoothie! With mild carbonation and a thick and creamy body, it’s hard to tell this is even a beer. It’s definitely one for the fruit lovers out there.
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