Fruit moose news

It's far from seasonal, but this range of Moosehead radlers arrived recently and I couldn't resist. Radler should perhaps be in inverted commas as they're a full 4% ABV. Good value for that at just €2 a can, or six for a tenner if you're really into it.

I began with Grapefruit, a sensible start as it's a normal fruit to find radlerised. It poured a pleasing hazy sunshine colour, with a fine white froth on top: a mousse head, if you will. The aroma offers stacks of real grapefruit rind, but also a different sort of bitterness, which I'm assigning to Germanic lager hops. They seem to have loaded it up with sugar as it's lemonade-sweet. Thankfully the pithy grapefruit is there to balance the flavour, adding a much-needed acidity to the finish. There's not much else to it, but radler isn't usually a ball of multifaceted complexity. It's refreshing, extremely easy drinking, and generally jolly decent. So that's the normal one. Now let's get weird.

Strawberry Lemonade. Oh God. This is going to be dreadful isn't it? It's a hazy pink and smells powerfully of strawberry concentrate, like lurid sticky chew sweets. I'm developing type-2 diabetes from the smell alone. On tasting it wasn't as sticky and cloying as I expected. The light texture and the lager base keep it from being a total disaster but it's still something of an alcopop. As such, you really need to drink this properly cold. With even the slightest warmth on board the lager loses its restraining power and the sugar takes over. The final half of the can was hard work. While I'm complaining, I feel gypped by the "lemonade" promise of the name. There's none of that. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising as, unlike the grapefruit one, there's no lemon in the ingredients, just carbonated water and citric acid, as well as "purple carrot juice", "red cabbage extract" and "glycerol ester of wood rosin". Mmm, wholesome. Perhaps it's time to put this aside and move on.

We're back to a cheery yellow colour with Peach Mango. At least both mango and peach show up on the ingredients. And the aroma, for that matter, with a concentrated peach cordial being the loudest part, but accompanied by a certain tangy mango too. This has a lot in common with the grapefruit one in the way it uses the fruit for flavour but manages to avoid over-sweetness. One wouldn't expect much bitterness yet there's a pleasant pinch of it in the foretaste. The finish is sweeter, of course, but in a way that's completely valid for something peach-flavoured. I feel I got off lightly here. It's not something I would choose if I weren't striving to complete a series, but all things considered it could have been much worse.

To finish, Watermelon. This had the faintest, and therefore most natural, aroma of any of them. Mostly it smells like lager, with merely a hint of watermelon rind. And so it goes for the flavour: the crunchy green quality of a watermelon's thick hide. There's a bit of a Jolly Rancher vibe, but without the hot solvent esters, and a fun peppery seasoning -- almost like you'd get from a real beer. It's perhaps not as refreshing as the grapefruit one, but makes up for it by having a more interesting flavour. You certainly get your money's worth of watermelon: that side of it is unmistakable, which is not always the case with lightly flavoured fruit, even in syrup form. I still think the Grapefruit is the best, but here's a commendable second place. I wouldn't object to more watermelon-flavoured beers on the market.

In conclusion, you do need to have a sweet tooth for this lot, and they're quite different from your more commonplace European radlers. Given the higher strength, it's hard to think of a use-case, here in the depths of winter.