Blackberry Festivale
Townsite Brewing

 

 

 

 

 

 

650ml bottle. I've never been to Powell River - does it rain big blackberries there in the wintertime?

This beer pours a hazy, bright medium pink salmon colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, bulbous, and mostly just plain fizzy purple-tinged white head, which leaves some chunky and streaky sudsy lace around the glass as it evenly subsides.

It smells of gritty wheat grain and bready pale malt, earthy yeast, muddled blackberries - more tart than sweet - and weedy, leafy, and mildly grassy hops. The taste is semi-sweet blackberries, frozen blueberries, a touch of green raspberry, and some aged lemon tartness to round out the fruity side of things. This is all atop a solid grainy and softly crackery pale malt, a waning spicy wheatiness, still hovering, but seemingly useless yeast, and a meek, but supportive leafy, grassy hoppiness.

The bubbles are quite frothy, but generally innocuous from the get-go, the body medium-light in weight, and just a bit too tight and stringent to be deemed particularly smooth. It finishes off-dry, sort of, as the grainy malt goes to ground, leaving us in the hands of the surprisingly engaging titular fruit.

A heck of a better fruit beer than I was expecting, no offense to the brewer, that's a universal bias of mine. What I mean to say, is that usually the given fruity guest ingredient gets short shrift, but not here - it's blackberries and a few of their ephemeral friends hosting the party, and letting everyone else share the stage. Good stuff, not overly complicated, but easy to drink and enjoyable all the same.