Kakeru Dry-Hopped Equinox Sour
Fuggles Beer

Bright golden yellow in color, mostly clear but with a bit of suspended sediment floating in it, poured with three fingers of puffy, irregular, white colored head that had a moderate retention and left a good amount of lacy patchwork on the glass.

Aroma has some faint grassy hints to it, that turns to a nice tropical scent with juicy lemons and pineapple with just a hint of lychee.

Moderately sour forward to it with the flavor of lemon flesh and peel with a dash of pineapple juice to it.

Highish carbonation to it but with a little more malt base to it then some sours, giving it a medium/ light body and mild sweetness.

Lightly bitter herbal/ grassy hop finish giving it a dry-hopped weedy quality that pairs well and evolve into, without overpowering, the tropical notes on the front end, and leaving a faint lemon pith and herbal dry-hop aftertaste with a lingering floral lychee note to it.

Excellently well balanced and easy drinking with a great hop flavor that does tropical juiciness and expressing dry hopped character without much lingering bitterness.

So Kakeru is weird for me because I first got a growler of it and thought it was a pretty good hoppy sour. Then a couple weeks later I grabbed a couple of bottles of it and uhh... my experience was significantly worse, and it's been consistent ever since (I have sampled it afterwards a couple of times), so I'm not sure how to explain the first growler fill tasting any different.

Anyway, long story short, for whatever reason, this just tastes like cabbage juice to me. I'm not even reaching for comparisons here, it literally tastes like cabbage juice. As a dirty East European, I have been privy to sampling the finest delicacies East European cuisine has to offer, and thus I am an expert on cabbage juice. This beer is actually very authentic in re-creating the taste, right down to the prickling on your tongue from the juice just starting to ferment.

Everything else about the beer is fine. It looks great. It's well-made - there are no off flavours in the aftertaste, it's very clean, crisp, etc. It just has the unfortunate attribute of smelling and tasting exactly like cabbage juice to me. Your mileage may vary.

 

Winter's here, but somehow I'm more in the mood for kettle sours, witbiers and saisons than stouts and porters, so I was happy to see a sour I haven't tried yet today at the liquor store.

A: Yellow-gold and only slightly hazy. Fizzy head is quick to dissipate.
S: Sour and a bit fruity.
T: Tart lemon followed by bitter grapefruit rind. Personally, I think I'd prefer some sweetness to balance out the sour and bitter flavours, but it is what it is.

650ml bottle - a kettle sour, dry-hopped with the Equinox varietal. As for the name, a cursory search for the meaning of 'kakeru' was just too complicated for this gaijin.

This beer pours a clear, bright medium golden yellow colour, with three fat fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and fizzy off-white head, which leaves some streaky old forest growth lace around the glass as it evenly subsides.

It smells of pungent tropical fruit (pineapple, passionfruit, and kiwi), further domestic citrus rind, a minor milky sourness, some hard to isolate pale malt graininess, and more leafy, floral, and herbal green hop bitters. The taste is somewhat tart lemon and white grapefruit flesh, a now muddled exotic fruitiness, some sort of soured dairy product (I'm leaning towards fruit-infused yogurt), a growing indistinct woodsiness, more benign-seeming crackery and grainy pale malt, and some testy floral, grassy, and herbal verdant hop bitterness.

The carbonation is fairly tight in its perfunctory frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and generally smooth, as it seems the hops might be the potential ingress culprit here, surprisingly. It finishes off-dry, but not by much, as the tart 'n sour fruitiness really settles in.

Overall - wow, now this is how sour ales should be, all fruity and tart, with the funk damned near nowhere to be seen, and good riddance, I say. At any rate, this is a pleasure to drink, refreshing, and a testament to the beauty of this particular hop.