Sunken Cathedral
Wild Mind Ales

Ever have your face eaten off? Every want to? Then try this blackberry and lime sour smoothie-style ale with hints of marshmallow, vanilla and milk sugar.

Pouring a deep and rusty indigo purple, Wild Mind's Sunken Cathedral rises with a lavender froth before falling red-wine still. With the sharp and tantalizing scent of berry and citrus aligning on the nose, the mouth waters and the jaws tighten immediately. Then as the first sip presumes, the sweeter tones of fructose, lactose, marshmallow extract or smoothie is short lived.

And that's because the brunt of sourness sets in and the middle palate is immediately awash with lactic acid. Bracingly sour, the sheer acidity of the beer washes all thirst and flavor from the palate and leaves behind remnants of blackberry with the more sour aspects of lime, lemon, crabapple, gooseberry and under ripened cranberries. Staying this course, the late palate is aggressively sour and with little of the smoothie aspects that are advertised.

Medium bodied to start, the beer finishes quick, dry, crisp, blatantly sour and unabashedly puckering. Seemingly doctored with added and pure lactic acid, the beer finishes brisk and sudden with little aftertaste. Not time to schedule a dentist visit to have my enamel put back on.