Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Sam Adams Coastal Wheat

When I was browsing the grocery store the other day I came upon a six pack of Coastal Wheat. I had seen it in this summers Sam Adams variety packs but had not tasted it yet. The beer is so new, in fact, that the Sam Adams website has yet to add it.

Thinking that this beer sounded kind of good I picked up a six pack and took it home. Unfortunately I was sorely disappointed!

I drank it out of a glass. It pours like a wheat beer would, orange and cloudy. The first thing I noticed when smelling the beer was the lemon scent. Very dominant. Besides that I picked up some other fragrant notes. But the lemon stood out. The taste confirms the dominance of the lemon in the beer. The lemon is everpresent and really strong. I guess if you love lemons then maybe you will favor this beer. The lemon tastes like it was poured out of a bottle of lemon flavoring, it has a distinct "artificialness" to it, and this negatively affects the taste for me. As for the mouthfeel, it was also par with most wheat beers. It may have been heavy on the carbonation, but otherwise is close to your run of the mill wheats.

I always like to suggest that people try a beer for themselves, and this is still the case here. But I would not recommend it.

1 comment:

timsagirl said...

When I was a bartender, we always served our wheat beers with a lemon wedge. The lemon was supposed to enhance the grainy flavor. It sounds like they did the same thing to the beer that they always do to bottled iced tea. Fresh iced tea is good with fresh lemon, but the bottled stuff has that same artificial lemony taste that you described. Too bad...