Kveik - Thai Tom Kha
Shades Brewing

 

12 ounce can at Shades Brewing in Salt Lake City. Poured into a pint glass.
Smell is funk and vomit, ginger and, um, dirt? Maybe?
Taste is sour vinegary funky malty limey carbonated muck., So why do I think it’s decent? I dunno.,.
Overall - Funkadors dig it. Couple of drinks says I get it, but will pass nxt time.,. unless there’s a shrimp cocktail sitting beside it.,.

 

1810
Name: Thai Tom Kha
Brewery: Shades Brewing
Location: Salt Lake City UT
Style: Sour
Date: Unknown
This beer has sat in my fridge for the last two months. I am scared of this beer. Tom Kha is a soup I enjoy; will this beer ruin it? Every time I open the fridge, this white can stares back at me. Time to face it.
I am using a tulip glass and serving it at 46 degrees. An airy one-fingered head with dismal retention was created from the hard pour. No lacing was left on the glass after the fast dissipation. The color is a murky straw yellow; however, if I charted it, it would fall somewhere around 6 SRM. This beer is hazy with lots of carbonation activity.
Here goes nothing! I smell coconut lime, herbal, toasted malts, floral, sour lemons, and earthiness. The beer smells like the iconic soup with a sour ale beer stirred in. Holy Shit, Shades has an uncanny ability to create what they say.
Alright, first sip; how does this work so well? Wow, my mind is blown. I taste ginger, coconut, herbal, lemongrass, limes, salt, sour vinegar, and a deep earthiness.
The mouthfeel is tart yet finishes crisp and dry. The body is light, and carbonation is medium.
I cannot believe I am going to say this. This beer is fantastic, in an odd sort of way. The more I sip, the more I enjoy it. I was nervous this beer was going to be awful. I have seen several on the market try to imitate something, and it is horrible.

 

A bit scared to try this brew because I don’t think I understand the flavor combination, let’s give er a try. Hazy and medium golden with a gone head. I can’t completely explain the nose, it’s got citrus ipa notes there’s also a funk going on. Oh man, this beer taste fantastic. It’s got some coconut, sweetness I dunno, slight sour bite on the end. Good pricklyness although not much carbonation to speak of. Hmm...good.

 

 

this won a gold medal at gabf in herb and spice beer, so i added it there, but the base is more like a berliner or a gose or something, its a sour, which for me usually comes before the herb and spice aspect when picking a style, but what do i know. the beer is amazing, and i am over the moon to have these guys sending some beer to boise now! they make great stuff, and this is what they do best as far as i am concerned. this is done with coconut, lemongrass, and galangal (!!!), and its just fabulous, truly like nothing i have ever tasted, and actually very similar to the famous soup, like it almost makes me want to drink this beer hot. its smells awesome, but its the flavor that really pops, the coconut is like coconut milk from the can, rich and fatty in here, neat above the citric tartness, the lemongrass is fresh muddled, natural as heck, and really forward as well. the galangal kind of works like ginger and turmeric put together in here, earthy, wet, spicy, fragrant, really sensational in combination with everything else going on here. the base is wheaty it seems, a little soupy and starchy to me, but i like the body this has, its needed for all the flavor i reckon, the tartness is offset by the richness of the coconut as well, but i want more carbonation here, a little refinement in texture would make this world class, if its not already. creamy and herbal and fresh and challenging but addicting at the same time. if this is kveik yeast, which the series name certainly suggests, its one of the best applications of it i have seen yet. its rare to me that a beer is really ever all that unique, i mean, we say unique a lot, like tasting a new hop or something, but at the end of the day, its usually always just in another dry hopped hazy beer or something, unique only in profile, not a whole unique entity, and really more of a new nuance than a new idea or anything. this beer is unique to its core, like nothing i have ever come across in more than a decade of heavy beer drinking, i loved it, and the crazy thing is how easy it would be to make this better still. blown away, this is a gem, not to be missed! sounds like a gimmick, but wait until you taste it!

edit: this has stayed consistently amazing, and i have found that with this, and a lot of the shades stuff, a little twirl of the can before opening is the move, reintegrate all the sediment so its not separated, it really does enhance the flavor. in this latest batch the beer seemed drier, more galangal forward which is nuts, so distinctive and real, and still absurdly authentic to the soup, almost even a mushroom thing going on in it. a crowd favorite and for good reason, this beer slays!