Beer is getting a juicy makeover for spring

Make mine a blood orange ale, says Frankie McCoy
Frankie McCoy9 March 2017

Put down the Pimms. If you want fruit in your booze you should try it in your beer. Don’t worry, fruity beer doesn’t have to mean sweet. Brewers across London are infusing their craft IPAs, sours and lagers with actual fruit, from oranges to berries, giving your usual can of fizzy alcoholic goodness a whole other refreshing aspect from inside the ring pull.

Fruit beers aren’t ‘girly’ beers (as if women need beer ‘mansplained’) although the juiciness and hint of sweetness does make them a brilliant gateway sip for self-professed hop haters put off by a hardcore bitter, grassy taste. Brody Rossiter, beer expert at online beer shop HonestBrew, points out that ‘sour beers overflowing with tart fruit notes have courted lovers of cider and white wine, offering a complex departure from hop-forward styles and versatility when it comes to food pairings’.

What’s more, says Jasper Cuppaidge, founder of Camden Town Brewery, adding fruit makes for beer that has ‘more honest flavours. Rather than adding sugar, we’re adding natural flavours, which complement the natural hops’. Camden Town has just launched a limited-edition rhubarb IPA for spring: 100kg of Yorkshire forced rhubarb went into producing 60 kegs of Foolish, a beer which smells deliciously of rhubarb-and-custard sweets. Cuppaidge is obsessed with ‘really authentic British flavours’, hence the short life span of Foolish, which will make way in summer for the strawberry-infused Strawberry Hells Forever lager. Last summer’s batch saw 350kg of strawberries hand chopped, blended and infused in the fermenting hops, ultimately producing thousands of litres of pale pink, tartly sweet lager. Camden Town’s next fruity project is to brew beer infused with elderflower — although Cuppaidge admits they’re struggling as ‘it’s quite vegetal’ — and greengages.

Beavertown also keeps its fruit beers seasonal. Right now you can snap up Bloody ‘Ell, its punchy and dangerously drinkable 7.2 per cent blood orange IPA. In autumn it’s all about Applelation, a Bramley apple saison that’s like apple crumble in a glass; when winter rolls around there’s Stingy Jack spiced pumpkin ale, which is as far from your syrupy Starbucks steamer as you can get.

Keep it light for spring, though, and try Crate Brewery in Hackney, with its Forest Fruits Sour: head brewer Mark Pether says that the addition of the fruit, which the brewery adds as a frozen puree at the end of fermentation, ‘not only gives it an eye-catching appearance, but also a pleasant and interesting flavour profile. The combination of the five fruits we add gives it a great berry flavour; the juicy fruit flavours complement the cutting tartness perfectly.’ Sour power continues at Magic Rock, whose range of neon- and silver-splattered cans include High Wire Grapefruit and Salty Kiss, a gooseberry-flavoured IPA that blends gooseberry, sea buckthorn and salt into a ridiculously addictive beer.

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Then there’s The Wild Beer Co, whose foraged ingredients make for outrageous flavours (mushroom, anyone?). Its fruity output includes the puckeringly tart Wild Goose Chase, infused with grapefruit, and Pogo, with passionfruit and guava. So drink up — it’s practically one of your five a day, right?

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