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| New Glarus Raspberry Tart on Labor Day Weekend 2012 on Lake Waramaug, CT |
With just one day left in April and the weather finally on a positive mend, we're already well on our way to summer. In anticipation of many hot sunny days spent BBQing in the back yard, rocking on the front porch, and reading on the beach, this beer preview looks ahead to some of the most seasonally appropriate brews for summer - namely, those that are highly refreshing and sessionable (low alcohol content), as well as those that feature sour, fruit, or wheat tastes.
My first summer beer-love (see above) was
New Glarus Raspberry Tart (4% ABV). Way back before I was even interested in beer, I came across a highly descriptive suite of reviews on
The Beverage Tasting Institute's website. One of the foremost there was Raspberry Tart, which their staff described accordingly: "Deep scarlet mahogany color. Aromas of toasted raspberry pastry and oily roasted nuts with a tangy, fruity-yet-dry medium-full body and a suede, Meyer lemon, and grassy earth accented finish. Fantastically flavorful." As a less-savvy beer consumer at the time, I was amazed that anything that qualified as beer could also be so clearly fruit-flavor-driven. I enthusiastically began a search to obtain a bottle, but quickly found that Raspberry Tart, like all of the brews from the world-class
New Glarus Brewery, were only available for purchase in their home state of Wisconsin. This might have proved a challenge, were it not for the fact that I luckily lived in Chicago at the time. On the way up to a friend's house on Lake Geneva that summer, I dropped into
Bruno's Liquors (524 Broad Street, Lake Geneva, WI - 262 248 6407) and picked up two bottles of Raspberry Tart and two of
New Glarus' Belgian Red (4% ABV), their famed cherry beer (both $10/25 oz bottle). Over the course of that summer, and for every summer since, I've cut the colored wax seal on a couple of these lovely bottles - mauve for Raspberry Tart and fire-engine red for Belgian Red.
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