Hey! Why don’t you bang your head against this?

I went to the beer tasting on Friday. I like Cellar Rat’s store a lot, and I had a nice time. It would have been more fun if more of you were there. But that’s ok. I had a going-away get together to go to afterwards, so I couldn’t stay anyway. On the way out the door, I snagged a 6 pack of Schlafly’s more recent seasonal releases, a Raspberry Hefeweizen. “Light, summery, girly, to be drank cold," were the types of things I imagined as the lovely man behind the counter rang up my purchase.

I stuck the 6 pack in my car, and went on a later-than expected, Friday-fueled bar crawl of sorts. I didn’t crack into one of the bottles until later on Saturday. Turns out that I should have grabbed the Summer Kolsch instead. And I really should have known better. I don’t do fruit beers.

It doesn’t really taste like beer with a raspberry tang as much as it tastes like a beer cocktail with raspberry flavored soda. Remember the shandy? Yeah, it’s kind of like that. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it. I drank one, and left the other 5 in my fridge, hopefully to offer to a more girlier girl than me.

It smelled a little sweet, like raspberry candy, when I opened it. It poured into my glass pink (pink!) but with mild cloudiness and beer-like qualities, so it didn’t look like pink lemonade or anything. It settled to a orangey-pink color with a light pink head of foam. It reminded me of the green St. Pat’s yuck, and it turned me off a bit. The flavor of the beer wasn’t raspberry, as in fresh raspberries, but rather raspberry-flavoring, like Kool-Aid. Kind of artificial. There were underlying beer flavors, to be sure, like some yeast and malts, and the slightest twinge of wheat.

To be fair, I don’t like 75th Street Brewery’s Royal Raspberry either, and was never fond of any of the fruity beers the now-extinct microbrews around here offered. So yeah, I know. What was I thinking? I guess I was trying to keep an open mind. The answer is that I still don’t like it. But if you do, you know where to find some for free!