Michael Donaldson explains the world of fruited beers and why we’re likely to see many, many more of them…

Fruit and beer are partners that go way back in human history. Before humans settled into agricultural life, growing grain to make alcohol, beer was made from whatever fermentable products could be found. This depended mostly on what continent the brewer lived, so anything that could be converted into ethanol was used, such as corn, sorghum, honey or fruit.

Eventually, modern beer settled on malt and hops as the two main ingredients. But fruit has always been there at the edges.

In Belgium it never went away. ‘Kriek’, made with cherries, or ‘Framboise’, with raspberries, are deeply ingrained in that country’s beer culture.

Even in Germany, with the so-called “purity law”, the classic way to have a ‘Berliner Weisse’ (a sour wheat beer) is with the addition of a sweet syrup, either almond-flavoured woodruff or raspberry.

So, the very modern trend of making fruit-flavoured beers is nothing new at all.

We’ve long had berries added to stouts for a flavour twist, while breadfruit and plantain are two more esoteric ingredients in Garage Project’s stunningly good Mutiny on the Bounty stout.

Occasionally, fruit will pop up in a traditional IPA – usually grapefruit, passionfruit or yuzu –all fruits that riff off the kind of flavour that hops bring to beer. With the rise of hazy IPAs we’re seeing more stonefruit such as mango and apricot coming in, again these are fruit flavours that play nicely alongside hops.

But it’s in the sour beers, in the manner of the Belgians, where fruit can really express itself, rather than being a sideshow for hops or malts.

Fruited sours come in a range of guises these days. There’s the barrel-aged variety defined by 8-Wired’s Wild Feijoa Ale, in which whole feijoas are stuffed into a barrel of wild-ferment beer and aged for a year. The latest edition, the 2021 vintage, is due out soon.

Then you’ve got the fruited kettle sours, which are the most common, and most Kiwi breweries will have a passionfruit sour, a raspberry sour, a yuzu sour or combinations of flavours, many often riffing off cocktail flavours.

But what’s really sparking punters’ tastebuds are best described as ‘ice cream sours’. This “style” was pioneered in New Zealand by Duncan’s in Paraparaumu with their head-turning Raspberry Ripple in 2018. Duncan’s use a lot of lactose for a creamy mouthfeel and the addition of vanilla on top of buckets of fruit pulp creates a refreshing sweet-sour drop that sometimes feels like drinking fruit juice rather than beer.

Another stunning example is Derelict’s Lemon Meringue. Described as a smoothie sour or a pastry sour, it’s made with lactose, vanilla, fresh lemon zest and fresh lemon juice. As you’d expect, it tastes just like lemon meringue.

Over this summer, Deep Creek took the fruited sours one step further when they became the first brewery to brew beers with fruit added after fermentation. In the United States and Britain these beers have been controversial for their propensity to create exploding cans, as the fruit is fermented after packaging and the increased carbon dioxide blows the can open. Breweries were criticised for putting the pressure on buyers to keep these beers cold enough to ensure the yeast stayed dormant and the cans intact.

But Deep Creek ensured that none of theirs would explode by pasteurising the beer, which is an expensive process that most small breweries can’t afford.

Their trio of fruited sours, all at 5% ABV or lower, are called Berrylicious, which does what it says, Hey Pina, which is like a jazzed-up lime and soda, and is super refreshing, and Mango Tango, which delivers huge passionfruit and mango and is reminiscent of fruit juice.

Deep Creek admits these beer-fruit juice hybrids are aimed at a young, non-traditional beer audience, but they seem to be hitting the spot, as the first batch vanished faster than an ice-block on a summer’s day.

Michael Donaldson is a Beer Writer of the Year, journalist and author

beernation.co.nz