Capri-Sun, le déluge

Let's get this over with.

Anyone paying attention to the speciality beer market in Ireland lately will have noticed that we've picked up a fruit lager habit from the UK. The shelves are awash with them, all 4% ABV and in ranges that seem mostly centred on peach and blood orange. I tried a couple of them during the summer and, unsurprisingly, wasn't very impressed. With so many more to get through, I've decided to do it one post, ripping off the band-aid, so to speak.

I started at the O'Hara's end, and the remaining two from their Bohem line. Bohem Lager Cut With Peach is their head-on take on the archetype, Jubel, although I've never had that and it isn't sold here, so I'm not in a position to compare. This looks as one would expect, pale and mostly clear. The peach additive is very obvious from the aroma, and resembles a cosmetic more than real fruit. That could have made the beer sticky, but instead it's quite thin. The lager is present as fizz but very little else: there's no malt or hop character here, and I suspect that may be something of a theme going forward. There's the peach syrup, however, as advertised and subtle as a brick. It's not horrible, but I didn't find it enjoyable. The one-dimensional taste might be forgivable if there was more beer substance to the product. As is, there's very little to like here.

The blood orange one was covered in the post linked to above, and the Bohem trilogy is completed by Bohem Lager Cut With Lemon. Same visuals as the above, though the aroma is rather more subtle, hinting at sweet lemon flavouring, rather than honking it out. It's still a watery lager base, of course, and this time the additive doesn't do much to offset the blandness. It's the effect you get from a slice of lemon floating in your mineral water, and if that's what you want from your beer then you're in luck. I think I preferred the low-key approach here to the strong perfume of the peach, but that doesn't mean this one is good. It strikes me that anyone who actually wanted a lemon-flavoured lager would want it more lemony than this. If you're not going all-in with the syrup, what's the point?

The other series I started in the previous post was Wicklow Wolf's Cúpla Beers, with the peach one. Now I'm staring down the barrel of two more. Cúpla Beers: Lemon is as you might expect. It looks like a cloudy lemonade and smells similar, with a little bit of zest and a heap of sugar. The flavour opens with that, including an almost saccharine metallic tang, but it doesn't double down on the syrup. I found the peach version retained a trace of proper lager in the background and this does too, though you have to look for it. That's not at all to say it tastes like proper beer. I found the fruit flavour builds quite quickly, eventually gumming up the palate, and I was glad it's only a 330ml can. With all the low-calorie, low-sugar guff on the label, I suspect they intend customers to drink more than one of these at a time. I wouldn't.

Instead, and probably not advisedly, I moved right along to Cúpla Beers: Tropical. What does that mean? The label helpfully tells us that's passionfruit, pineapple and mango, presumably delivered in separate tubs rather than one big drum. I liked the look of this one: it's clearer and darker than the lemon, so at least looks more like beer. The aroma is very artificial, however, and likewise the flavour doesn't taste like any of the advertised fruit. Instead it's pure candyshop. I'm getting Jelly Babies, with overtones of Fruit Pastilles and the saccharine tang again, here calling to mind some weird off-brand chew sweets from the more disreputable sort of convenience store. Ghastly business. It's honkingly sweet, messily flavoured and utterly artificial. I defy anyone but the most hardened Kopparberg drinker to get through more than one of these. Ack. I've honestly tried to give all of these a fair assessment, and point out their positive sides. This has none. I take back any suggestion that going "all in with the syrup" is a good idea.

Rye River, to its credit, puts its name and logo on the cans of its series, albeit in a missable pale grey on white. They've called it 225° and it's "the angle of change", apparently. The change from proper beer, perhaps. Anyhoo, we'll start with 225° Peach. It's the pretty standard medium gold colour, with perhaps a slight greyish cast. The peach aroma is fantastically colourful, and enjoyably perfumish, missing any artificial twang. It's heavy textured and a bit syrupy, but the peach taste, like the aroma, is remarkably real. There's a fleshy sumptuousness up front, like ripe and juicy stonefruit. It finishes quickly, however, and where the competition sometimes put a bit of crisp lager character, here there's nothing. The peach is great, but that's all there is. A dash of Archers schnapps and a splash of soda water would give you a similar effect. Probably. Don't actually try that. Drink this if you like things -- but not necessarily beers -- that are peach flavoured.

After the peach, there must be blood orange, though the boffins of Celbridge have decided that can't carry a beer by itself, hence 225° Blood Orange & Yuzu. They've lost the grey element, and this is a bright and sunny yellow shade. So far all of these have tasted at least somewhat like a soft drink, but this is the most Fanta of the lot. And I don't mean that woke, hazy yellow Fanta that it was forced to become in the 1990s; I mean the lurid neon-orange sticky stuff that was little more than sugar, water and tartrazine, which made a man of me before the EEC banned it. Probably. Anyway, fake orange is how this smells, and that is heavily the flavour. It's real sugar to begin with but turns unpleasantly to saccharine by the end. The word "yuzu" makes me think of calm, peaceful and above all ordered, Japanese arboriculture. This beer has none of that. At best it's a retro soda; at worst a cloying sticky mess of clagging, clashing sugary citrus goop. The callback to childhood soft drinks was pleasant, though, even if I doubt it's pitched at ageing GenXers. Sorry if that's not helpful, but you probably already know whether or not you'll be buying this. And I can guess which.

From there to 225° Pineapple & Grapefruit. Maybe the citrus will give us some bitterness, I hoped. Nope. There's precious little by way of grapefruit in this. They might have used plenty of it, but the pineapple sweetness drowns it out. That leaves it tasting pretty much like pineappleade, though I will confess that the last time I drank a glass of that, it was delivered by the mineral man and came in a thick returnable glass bottle, so we're in retro soda territory again. Like a fizzy soft drink, it's mostly watery and, well, fizzy. There's virtually no beer character in this, and nothing resembling complexity, despite two different headline additives. I will grant that its tropical styling makes it refreshing, and maybe even a bit fun, but there are more interesting colourful fruity booze drinks in this space. That a proper brewery is reaching for some of that action is a bit cringe, as the alcopop drinkers like to say.

The range finishes with a curveball. Maybe they've been deliberately aiming to reference the kids' drinks of the 1980s, because the last of the set is 225° Blue Raspberry, a flavour known only in these parts from Slush Puppies. Sadly, the beer isn't blue, though I will note on the visual side that this had the best head retention of any of the ones covered. The first sip reminded me of the other context for blue raspberry: bubblegum. It tastes exactly like one of those purple gum spheres with the candy shell coating. I'm now convinced Rye River is after the ageing GenXers. There's no other reason for this to exist. I mean, the intense cloying nature of it means it doesn't work as a refreshing beer, and it goes without saying that it doesn't taste of beer at all, least of all lager. We're leaning fully in to the late 20th century's candy and I have nothing else to say about it: either you're entertained by that, or you'll hate this beer. I guess with the phrase "Blue Raspberry" we shouldn't have expected anything else, but I'm still shocked by the brazenness of it.

"Brazen" is probably the best overall descriptor for the 225° set. They go hard with the flavouring and give no quarter to the beer side. That's an approach, though I don't know if it's within the spirit of this whole genre, where there's usually at least a token nod in the direction of actual beer.

Rí-Rá has just one contribution to the form, peach flavoured and with a horror of an AI-generated label. That's not how leaves work, you stupid clanker. Juicy Peach is more subtle than the other peach ones. The fruit doesn't quite shout, though it is unmistakably there, particularly in the aroma. On the flavour, it's muted; everything is muted, in fact. There's a very basic macrolager crispness: that's fizzy, with all the character of mineral water. There's no more than a dash of peach flavouring, which jumps quickly in then out of the taste, leaving it plain and dry at the end. Maybe I should be thankful that this isn't horribly sugared up, but I don't see the point of it. I suddenly have a new appreciation for Rye River's lash-in-the-syrup approach. At least that made me feel something.

The fruit lager phenomenon must be making enough of an impact in Ireland that Aldi (for whom the UK and Ireland are the same operation) decided we needed their take on Jubel as well. Confusingly, it says "Anti Establishment" on the side of the can, a reminder that their non-mainstream beer knock-offs were originally intended to copy BrewDog, of blessed memory.

Joiva Lager is the non-infringing name they've come up with, and we'll begin, of course, with the Peach Session. It smells very perfumey, though not specifically of peach, more a general fruity cosmetic or lip-balm vibe. One major point of difference is the texture: it's soft, at almost nitrogenated level, which really helps its drinkability. What doesn't help is the intense sweetness. As with the aroma, it's at a distant remove from real peach, while stopping short of saccharine chemical concentrate. This is more like a ready-made dessert or preserve; something that did involve real peaches somewhere early in the process. While it's a big sweet hit up front, it finishes decently quick and doesn't cloy as it goes along. It doesn't taste like proper lager, but if you are going to add the syrup to one, this has hit a fairly innocuous level of concentration.

Peach, as we have discovered, is the easy level. For today's finisher, at long last, it's Joiva Lager: Mango Session.  It's a pale chap, looking clear and innocent and yellow in the glass while smelling pleasantly cake-like, with essence from the baking aisle which could pass as tropical fruit, or a number of other sweet-treat-adjacent aromas. I will admit that it's been a long time since I've eaten a piece of actual mango, but I'm reasonably sure they don't taste like this. There's a strong element of girly cosmetics again, overly sweet and plainly beyond juice into processed concentrate. While it lacks any proper beer characteristics, it doesn't build unpleasantly, so ends up tasting like a drink-and-forget alcopop. That's a failure for a beer, but for a cheap supermarket ready-to-drink it's fine. File it with the Malibu cocktail knock-offs and everyone's happy.

I didn't think there would be eleven beers when I started this post. I sincerely hope I have, as the kids like to say, catched 'em all. However, I'm also painfully aware that brand extensions are very much a thing in this market, and of how easy it would be to make new versions of these using the same recipe but a different tub of gunk. Just give me the winter off, breweries. Please?