Ume Umai
Gigantic Brewing Company

...This beer is a straight knockout. So easy to drink and pairs with about anything. Its tea colored with streaks of purple hidden within. Sediment at the bottom.

Aromas of plum, rice malt, and a little ash.

Flavor is delicious. Like biting into a golden plum. Nice faint smoke on the finish. Not temperature sensitive.

Feel is creamy, crisp, delightful.

This beer is freaking awesome. My favorite by Gigantic so far. Really hitting the spot. Haven't been this enthused by a beer all week.

12/02/2016

 

Pours a bit off color, but in the glass it's deep gold-pale amber color. White head. Thick. Decent persistence.
Mild, clean smell. Slightly earthy, but in no way offensive.
Taste is like a mild cross between a Kolsch and a Gueze. Very easy to drink. I dig it. A bit of sour, but not a lot. No hoppiness, so, for me, this is like a trip to Mars: unfamiliar. Light like Bud or Coors, but not shitty like those beers.
Mouthfeel is fine, Not overcarbonated.
Overall this is a damn fine summer beer.

Props to joemcgrath27 for this treat. Pours a hazy peach colour with a thin layer of head with no retention or lacing. Grassy hop notes with hints of bread and a touch of plum. Flavour profile is loaded with the grassy hop notes and bready malts, there's a subtle hint of plum, but I can't say I'm detecting the rice (admittedly, a unique flavor to specifically identify). Medium bodied and super dry on the finish. A tasty brew, surprisingly complex, worth a try definitely unique.

 

The initial taste and bite is pale ale leaning towards amber ale. The finish makes me think of a dark Belgian or dark German concoction. There's a dark sugar thing going on, along with a dark fruit thing which probably comes from the umeboshi. It's interesting but I don't think I'd want another serving of it. It's a little muddled for me. Fans of Scotch ales or red ales might enjoy the profile of this brew, it's just not for me.

 

 

 

 

 

Hazy golden orange with a fine-grained foam in the tall Timmermans goblet. Veils of lacing in the glass and a fizzy mouthfeel. Poured from the 22 oz bottle purchased at Elizabeth Station in Bellingham. Aroma of pear with a whiff of butter.

Deeply fruity flavor in the nicest way. Then after sipping for a while it tastes so deliciously of brown rice. Toasty, grainy flavor that is just great. Then the tart edge of the plum finishes it off. What an interesting beer. I think it will take a while to finish this, but it's a better kind of oddball beer that we are usually treated to.

 

 

 

 

 

22oz bottle - what's with the abundance of octopi on the label - some sort of Japanese thing?

This beer pours a rather hazy, medium golden yellow colour, with two fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and bubbly chalky white head, which leaves some low-lying continental ice sheet profile lace around the glass as it evenly subsides.

It smells of zesty and estery Belgian yeast, singed brown rice, grainy pale malt, mixed stone fruit (plums, sure, but also bruised Gala apples and underripe red and white grapes), and some subtle boozy notes. The taste is definitely more ricey than straight-up malty - and in that weirdly earthy sense that you get in various dishes at your local sushi joint - with a prominent, if still duly muddled black fruity fleshiness (mostly ripe plum in nature), well settled-down yeasty meanderings, though for some reason I'm reminded of that weird stuff they use to make sake, and a hovering, but not quite alighting alcohol edginess.

The carbonation is quite pleasant in its solely playful and engaging frothiness, the body an adequate middleweight for any such broad style, and fairly smooth, with a sense of inborn creaminess not necessary to justify nor quantify. It finishes not as dry as proclaimed, as the rice-led graininess and lingering plum fruitiness appear to be not even close to fully attenuated.

Overall, not a bad, but yet somewhat lost in translation brew, the flavours of the rice and plum doing well by themselves to stand up and be noticed - and I suppose I now know why the mention of 'dry' on the label description is encapsulated in the written version of air quotes. Easy enough to drink, but it is making me jones for some spicy tuna rolls.