Berries Of The Night Raspberry Wheat
Arrowhead Brewing Company

 

650ml bottle - nicely tasteful raspberry strip club imagery depicted on the label. Those BC raspberries be workin' hard for the money!

This beer pours a murky, pale golden salmon hue, with two fingers of puffy, foamy, and duly bubbly off-white head, which leaves some stringy blood splatter lace in places around the glass as things quickly recede.

It smells of rather balanced and fruity raspberry - ya know, the tart and the sugary sweet notes dancing a dance of attrition and reduction, until your palate just sez, 'enough already - gimme more!' - a bready, grainy, and doughy pale and wheat malt, with a wee sense of earthy, leafy hops that should know better than to tangle with this particular guest ingredient. The taste is a somewhat redacted version of the previous few sentences - the raspberry essentially not nearly as peppy and sassy as the aroma let on, the plainly grainy wheat and more robust pale malt holding tight, with a leafy, weedy, and dried-hay like hoppiness poking its head out from under the covers.

The carbonation is nicely sedate in its enveloping and coddling frothiness, the body a so-so middleweight, and generally smooth, the malt doing well to keep itself busy while the raspberries get themselves ready for a refill, recharge, re-whatever. It finishes off-dry, the fruitiness showing a little extra leg, before the malt slams down the padded hammer.

A more or less genial and unassuming fruity wheat beer (I wonder what Duncan Trussell would think of this - 'fermented wheat juice', indeed - stick to your musings on pot, dude), one where the raspberries come and go as they please, pay no cover, and have me grasping for more, even though I do know that it's bad, oh so bad for me. Yeah.

Overall, this is a very nice fruit beer. The berry presence is enough to be refreshing, but not so much that you forget you are drinking a wheat ale. I would say that the arrowhead came close to the bullseye with this beer.