WE'VE come a fair way from beer just being water, barley, hops and yeasts. A lot of craft brewers now chuck in a few extra ingredients to add flavour and more to their brews.
Of course, different flavours can be derived from different hops, varied malts and even yeasts, but there has been a persisting trend among beermakers to add fruit to their beers.
Now, this is by no means a new phenomenon – fruit beers have been doing the rounds in Belgium for decades. Just take the famous Kriek cherry beer which I first sampled on my previously mentioned trip to Bruges. But as always, modern craft brewers are always seeking ways to take things in new and different direction
Last week I cracked open a couple of cans from Beavertown which rely heavily on fruity influences – their blood orange IPA Bloody 'Ell and their Heavy Water imperial stout with raspberry, cacao and vanilla.
Very often when we talk about fruit in beer, it's in a pale ale or IPA, but berry fruits are very compatible with dark ales and stouts.
Heavy Water is every bit as 'heavy' as it suggests, clocking in at 10.4 per cent. It comes in Beavertown's signature 330ml and pours jet black with a slight tan head. It fires off rich aromas of coffee, burnt toast and dried fruit.
As the ingredients suggest, there are some pretty complex flavours going on. You get all that coffee and bitter chocolate but the raspberry brings a mixture of sweetness and tartness to proceedings. It has quite a think mouthfeel and is a real end-of-the-night sipper.
Bloody 'Ell has made its seasonal reappearance. Bringing out annual versions of the same beer is a great way of generating anticipation and this year's incarnation seems to have borne that out, with Bloody 'Ell 2018 being snapped up at a rapid rate.
I managed to get my hands on a can, though, and found the main difference in this latest version to be how juicy it was in comparison to previous years, although not as overtly sweet.
The mouthfeel is not as creamy as last year, with this one being a bit of a thinner, sparkling number. It's still a great thirst quencher, but at 7.2 per cent, it’s hardly sessionable, which is just as well because cans are disappearing fast.
