Salted Watermelon Sour
Stanley Park Brewing

 

 

330ml bottle - a Gose-style kettle sour, brewed with coriander, sea salt, and 'natural watermelon flavour'. Part of the current Stanley Park Brewing summer mixed-pack.

This beer pours a slightly hazy, pale golden yellow colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, finely foamy, and somewhat creamy eggshell white head, which leaves some random streaky lace around the glass as it quickly dissipates.

It smells of watermelon chewing gum, bready and doughy cereal malt, a hint of salted white crackers, and some faint generic citrus rind. The taste is tart watermelon candy, saltine crackers, gritty and grainy pale malt, some indistinct earthy spiciness, still rather faint citrus notes, and some tame leafy, weedy, and floral green hoppiness.

The carbonation is fairly active in its palate-pinging frothiness, the body a decent medium weight, and mostly smooth, as that sour/salty thing makes a minor dent in the proceedings at this particular juncture. It finishes trending dry, the fruit kind of tailing off.

Overall - this comes across as a well-made version of the style, with the watermelon adjunct judiciously applied. It's definitely not that sweet, and actually quite refreshing, on another very warm Alberta summer day. It might be a tad surprising to many of the people who try it because of the mixed-pack, but I like it.