Silly season

Sour beer with unusual ingredients is one of my regular hobby horses. Nothing's too outré to dissolve in a properly acidic beer solution for me. So when a whole set of this sort of beers arrived in from Hungarian brewer Horizont, I grabbed three of them.

First up is Gimme My Ice Tea!, which is brewed with lemon, lime, bergamot and tea, finishing at 4.2% ABV, to create a sense of ice tea in a beer. In the glass it's a cloudy yellow colour and the head is short-lived. The aroma has far more lemon than tea, and is freshly zesty, like a cloudy lemonade or similar high-end soft drink. Low carbonation helps the ice tea effect, though in the flavour it takes a moment to taste past the excessively loud lemon. The bergamot's perfume is first to come through, and there's a slick citric oily quality which is unmistakably lime. Tea though? There's maybe a very mild tea flavour, but none of the dry tannins. I don't really miss it. The beer is intended to be refreshing, and it manages that satisfactorily via the citrus and the sourness. A beer created to mimic ice tea doesn't necessarily have to taste exactly like it. This achieves the effect well, and I doubt anyone could complain it's not as advertised. I have lots of time for the light, clean and zingy sort of summer fruit beers.

The beer in the selection that caught my eye first was Papa Prosciutto & Fungi, with the ham in the name and the mushrooms on the label. It's part of a "Pizza Series" of gose-ish beers from the brewery, and here the ham effect is done with smoked malt and the mushrooms with mushrooms. I went in sceptical, but intrigued. It pours an innocent pale orange shade, which I guess is meant to invoke the tomato element, and while tomato paste is listed as an ingredient, I suspect the colour has more to do with the black beetroot which also appears. The aroma is extremely savoury, with tomato seeds and basil (also listed) to the fore. In the flavour, it's the smoke first, and rather acrid it is too, tasting more like an upwind industrial accident than smoked ham. The sweet basil sits next to it and is quite jarring, and then a strong umami effect finishes it off with a note of anchovy, but which presumably emanates from the mushroom powder. It's a mess. For one thing, there's no sourness; nothing spritzy and fizzy to cleanse the extremely savoury elements, and as such I recommend strongly against drinking this with actual pizza. Or indeed drinking it at all. This is the sort of thing that gives ridiculous novelty beers a bad name. I would love to like it, but that's not on the cards, or anywhere near the cards. If we're ordering again from the Horizont pizza series, no ham or mushroom on mine.

The next one is at least a little more respectful of its base style: a Flanders red called Cherries on Acid. The architects of the archetype, Rodenbach, have been known to add cherries to their reds, so Horizont doing it is fine by me. The beer is an attractively clear dark red, although the head is loose and doesn't last long. Its aroma is fully to style, mixing tart red fruit with a sticky caramel or treacle effect. The latter seems to be the result of slightly too much residual sugar, and there's quite a heavy mouthfeel. Sourness is still in plentiful supply: tangy and spritzy, with the acidic bite of fresh raspberries and blackcurrants. The cherry element is a little muted, however, and I'm not sure I would have guessed any were included, since this style can taste very cherry-flavoured anyway. Balancing the sourness is the dark and brittle caramel I noticed in the aroma. I'm not sure it adds anything positive, but it doesn't interfere with the basics either. At 5.4% ABV, it's only slightly stronger than Rodenbach, but seems beefier and altogether more involved, even if it's not as cleanly tart. I enjoyed it regardless.

A lesson was learned here, mainly about the wisdom of loading a gose up with mushrooms (don't). It was especially interesting how different the three beers were from each other. Tragically, however, the daft recipes didn't work as well as the one which stuck closest to the established way of doing things. It would appear that the type of "creativity" on display here works better in theory than in the glass.