Golden Sour - Wine Grapes
Toasted Barrel Brewery

500 ml bottle from the brewery store. Pours gold with a little pink tint, very small white head. Aroma: sour, but with a noticeable chemical smell. The best I can describe it is rubber cement, maybe a little felt tip marker. Taste is very tart, white wine with a little bit of wood. Very acidic finish. The acidity makes me want to say vinegar, though the taste isn’t really vinegary. Overall disappointing, given that it was an expensive 500 ml. I want Toasted Barrel to succeed but part of that is admitting when a batch didn’t turn out right.

i was stoked to try something really ambitious like this from these guys, who i have liked in limited exposure and heard great things about, was even willing to buck up north of 20 bucks for a bottle at slackwater in ogden if i remember right, but the beer isnt great, and its frustrating at that price, the quality is an order of magnitude below what they are asking for it, no matter how long it took to make or how expensive the fruit was. this is the kind of experience that if enough people have it, will weed out the good beer from the bad beer before too long, cant imagine anyone paying up for the next one unless it either improves a lot or the price comes way down. i didnt hate it, just at that price. the color is stained a little red but it looks dull, worse, its near flat, and it looks a touch thin for what it is, unrefined right from the start. aroma is better, some obvious wine character, plum too, maybe even raspberry, but there is a vomit essence here too, almost butyric, stinky, off, purely bacterial to me, no real funk, and any wood here doesnt mellow it much. a little sweetness in the taste from the fruit, vinegar and bracing acidity, sharp rose wine to me, maybe a floral hibiscus sort of thing, but the weird ferment really is a turn off, especially as this warms, it almost hurts my teeth to have it in my mouth. this is not the first beer ive had that is like this, and it definitely wont be the last, as more small and perhaps even amateurish brewers try to get into this sort of thing, and it doesnt bother me all that much, i finished the bottle with one other dude, but they need to price accordingly. i wanted so much more from this, based on what i thought i knew about this brewery and the price and the fact that im in love with grape beers right now, but it really let me down. maybe it will improve with age, but there isnt a whole lot here suggesting it will. cool they used local wine grapes, but are utah wines really a thing? im not going to suspect or blame inferior fruit, but thats not something ive heard much about before. skip it if its any more they seven or eight bucks...