Gooseberry/Northern Kiwi: 2020 Harvest
Hill Farmstead Brewery

 

 

 

This one pours a clear dull orange color, with a small and very fizzy head, and not much lacing.

This smells bracingly acidic, with a stale, musty, almost like old attic aroma, along with apple cider vinegar.

This just might the worst Hill Farmstead beer I’ve ever had. I normally adore this brewery – they’re my favorite brewery, really. But, even the mighty can sometimes stumble, and boy did they stumble here. I could barely get through 3 ounces of the 375ml bottle here, it really was so unpleasant. The funk here is stale, old, and just really musty. It reminded me of like a really old and poorly kept bottle of low quality lambic, with just that weird cobwebby funk. Gooseberry and kiwi are not exactly common fruits to use in wild ales, and I imagine something weird happened with one of them – I couldn’t really tell which one, as the fruit character was pretty minimal overall. There was a distinct vinegar and apple cider character as well.

This is light bodied, and extremely hard to drink. Finishing a whole bottle of this one would have been quite a chore.

The Harvest series has had some decent highs, but is overall struggling to get over a lower bar than either the fruited Annas or the fruited Floras.