Price: $6.95 for a 22oz bottle, plus bottle deposit
Brewery: Ambacht Brewing, Hillsboro, Oregon
Style: Porter/Fruit Ale
Color: Mud puddle brown, with highlights of pink.
Aroma: Hops, with hints of cherry and sourness.
Body: Light-Medium
Stomach Aspect: Light, after pint your not full (as you would be with Stout) but you've known you've drank a beer.
Head Retention: When poured the brew had a small head, about a 1/6" high. After a few minutes the beer does not have a head. The beer is not flat, it just doesn't have any head retenion.
Taste: Take a pull from the beer and you get some sweetness on the tongue, move the brew to the middle of your tongue and you get the sour "zing" from the cherries. Move the beer to the back of your tongue and you get the hop bitterness. Just before the hop bitterness there is a slight, slight hint of grains.
Conclusion: While the bottle has a simple and basic label, the beer is even more simple. The color is a little weird, but the aroma is not bad at all. The body of the beer is a bit light for a porter, I was expecting a porter to have a medium-heavy body, not a light-medium body. You can definately taste the pie cherry's in the beer. Which is a nice becuase the label states "Pie Cherry" (not Cherry Pie) Porter. The hop balance is nice, almost over bearing the cherry sourness. This is a brew that while it isn't bad, I think it's one of those that you buy once to taste, and put knotch in your beer belt. It definately is a different style of beer which might put some people off from drinking fruit beers. I have made fruit beers before, and if you get the fruit, grains, hops ratio correct the beer turns out awesome. I think this brew should have more grain presence while keeping the fruit and hops where they're at.
Just a side note: If you like sour or Pie Cherry's then you'll enjoy this brew. As I stated, it's not bad, it's just not my style. But, you have to kudos to a brewery who isn't affraid to put something out that might or will offend someone. I say good job Ambacht brewery.
Thanks for tasting our Pie Cherry Dark: Our cherry ales get the biggest range of responses: Everyone tastes them differently.
ReplyDeleteThe two ends of the taste spectrum came from one bottle of our Pie Cherry Pale with one person tasting right after the other at the Orenco Station Farmers' Market: The first said they didn't taste cherry at all; and the second said they thought it tasted like cherry cough syrup. Most folks find them pleasantly cherry and not too sweet.
The sour comes from the 150 lbs of pie cherries from Yamhill OR added after the primary fermentation. We make our ales from organic malts and finish them very dry, this one finished at 1.006 and we bottle condition with honey (blackberry is the usual)