Sweet sounds

Being at home on the June Bank Holiday Sunday meant being an involuntary audience member at the Forbidden Fruit music festival, taking place at The Royal Hospital Kilmainham but broadcast directly onto my patio some distance away. I got out some fruit of my own and made the best of it.

I began on Utenos Radler Raspberry, blended from half lager and half raspberry-flavoured syrup cocktail, finishing at 2% ABV. It's bright pink, thanks to the carrot named on the can as the source of its colour. I found it very thick and syrupy, and was hard-pressed to find the beer element in it. The raspberry is sweet, not tart, and more closely resembles jelly or candy than actual berries. That hampers the all-important refreshment power; it's not difficult drinking by any means, but neither is it much cop at warm-day thirst quenching.

I felt a little oversugared after that, so was apprehensive about launching into another from the same range straight after, but soldiered on anyway. Utenos Radler Watermelon is the same strength and made the same way, just with a different syrup component. It works rather better than the raspberry one, and is less stickily sweet. The melon flavour is as much rind as flesh, adding a green, slightly vegetal tang, which helps balance the sugar. A slightly lighter body makes it more refreshing, and the addition of a couple of ice cubes really helped it along there. It still doesn't really count as a beer, but as a watermelon-flavoured low-alcohol drink, I quite enjoyed it.

Last up is one from fellow Lithuanian brewer Volfas Engelman: Radler Mojito Splash, a pale green number, with 2.5% ABV, resulting from a boost in the beer component, to 51%. It still doesn't resemble beer. We're back in the heavy, sugary territory, and that's the first noticeable thing about it, which isn't a good sign. The mint is laid on thickly, doing nothing to make the beer refreshing, only causing it to taste like toothpaste. The lime is very much lime candy, rather than proper citrus, and adds neither bitterness nor sourness to the picture. I can see how this might have worked in a thinner, zestier beer; what you get here is a bit of a sugary mess.

Radler is supposed to be consumable in volume, and refreshing. The above litre and a half was hard work to get through and even outdoors on a sunny summer's afternoon, they were filling and dense. I don't mind sweetness in drinks, but these were quite one-dimensional in how they presented it, the samey sugar both cloying and boring. I don't often review radlers on this blog. Here's why.