Fruit Hog - Strawberry Blonde
Brewsters Brewing Company & Restaurant - Eleventh Avenue

A pint of the current Fruit Hog seasonal.

This beer appears a cloudy, almost opaque muddled golden colour, with two fingers of airily foamy, fluffy white head, which settles at a timid rate, leaving some consistent specked painted lace around the glass.

It smells of green, floral, perfumed strawberries, a bit of yeast, and a soft wheaty graininess. The taste is sugary, wit-like, but with candied strawberry in place of the citrus - fruit, sweet earthy spice, and yeast, with a low leafy hoppiness throwing in for the balanced cause.

The carbonation is quite soft, but not totally benign, the body a so-so medium weight, and generally smooth, the fruit and wheat going unchallenged. It finishes with more of the yeast-tinged, sweet wheat malt, and an increasingly generic berry fruit essence, the strawberry focus lost by this point.

It may be strange to say that the dumbing down of the titular guest ingredient is in fact a good thing, but in this case, it's true. Otherwise, this nice, fruit-kissed wheat ale could have ended up more along the lines of Fruili, Silenus forbid.