The Bar Towel

Tried one of Heritage's "Solstice Series" beers last night. It was the Blackcurrant Rye Beer....I found it to be clean, fruity and spicey with decent hop bittering but still a tad unbalanced towards sweetness....but that isn't always a bad thing in a fruit beer.

I was struck by the poor reviews this beer had gained over the last few years because what I was drinking seemed rather decent..... if there was a fault it's that it was biased to the sweet side by the real fruit concentrate but there was a nice spiciness to it from the flaked rye and choice of hops.

I thought I'd come here and ask Perry if he had anything to do with tweeking this beer from it's former recipe?

It says this is a 5.5% beer and the former offerings were 4.5% but I wonder if that's all that has changed??

Perry?

According to some inside info I got the other night, this year's version of the Blackcurrant Rye was brewed using an ale base, while last year's was brewed using a lager.

Considering that Heritage didn't make ales until the Scotch-Irish deal, I would strongly suspect that one of the S-I brands (most likely Sarge?) is now being used as the base beer.

I poured my glass of Heritage Blackcurrant Rye down the drain. I couldn't stomach it.

As I mentioned in another post though, I did notice a similar base character between these beers, especially in the aroma but also in the taste. Actually it's common between all of Heritage's products, and I noticed it again last night in the Church-Key West Coast IPA (yuck).

As much as I love the Sarge, I find this "whatever-it-is" aroma and flavour quite funky and unpleasant.