Eagle Weiss
Wild Clover Breweries

 

340ml bottle, part of a quartet of offerings from this South African craft brewery to recently find their way to Alberta bottleshop shelves. A more summery offering, one might opine, but since it's +11C in the middle of February, I'll let it pass.

This beer pours a hazy, medium golden yellow colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, finely foamy, and somewhat creamy off-white head, which leaves a bit of streaky island group lace in places around the glass as it rather lazily sinks away.

It smells of gritty and grainy pale malt, a lesser edgy wheatiness, damp banana chips, earthy clove and white pepper spice, and just a hint of phenolic yeastiness. The taste is bready and doughy pale malt, some rather sweet caramelized and wheaten cereal notes, a mixed bowl of fruitiness (banana, orange, and apple/pear), sort of spicy clove, coriander, and generic ground pepper, and an ethereal sense of leafy and floral hop bitterness.

The carbonation is fairly active in its go-get-em-boys frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and more or less smooth, with a nice inborn creaminess evolving as things warm up a tad. It finishes off-dry, the mixed malt and fruitiness really running the show.

Overall, I like this one more than I was anticipating - the fruity essences really helping the cause here. Simple, and easy to drink, but I think that the sweetness might do my palate in after a couple. It's a shame I'll probably never find out.