Summer Squishy is a fruit sour brewed with pineapple, coconut, lactose, vanilla and sea salt.
So, today would have been the Great Taste of the Midwest.
It’s the first time since “Top Gun” was in theaters in 1986 that there’s been a summer with no Great Taste. (The pandemic cost us the “Top Gun” reboot this year, too.)
Anyone even vaguely aware of the craft beer community in Madison knows the magnitude of this loss, and I’m not going to belabor the point. I’ve written year after year about how great the Taste truly is.
I’m sure there were many do-it-yourself Great Tastes this weekend, with (hopefully) small groups of friends in backyards sharing great — or at least interesting — beers (hopefully while maintaining social distance).
The Great Taste’s organizers, the Madison Homebrewers and Tasters Guild, even provided the drinking vessel for such events, a “Backyard Edition” stainless steel tumbler instead of the fest’s small tasting glass. Great Taste Chairman Jason Walters said sales of the tumbler had raised around $25,000 for local charitable causes — not far off from the $30,000 the guild donates in normal years.
For my Great Taste stand-in, I went to my favorite Madison bottle shop and picked up a pretty weird-sounding beer from a Midwestern brewery I don’t usually drink a lot of beer from.
As I write this, I’m planning to pour it in some previous year’s Great Taste glass and drink it outside at 1 p.m., the time the horn sounds and the massive line outside the gate at Olin Park starts moving in. I might even get just a little too sweaty beforehand, to make the experience a little more authentic.
Summer Squishy
Brewed by: Oliphant Brewing, Somerset
Style: The label says this is a fruit sour brewed with pineapple, coconut, lactose, vanilla and sea salt. Vanilla and lactose (milk sugar) are what makes a milkshake “IPA,” while sea salt and sour points to gose, a German wheat ale. So maybe this is a ... milkshake gose? Crazy thing is this surely wouldn’t have been the weirdest beer at the hypothetical 2020 Great Taste.
What it’s like: If that sounds like a beer version of a pina colada, you’re on the right track.
Where, how much: Oliphant has been sending a small amount of beer to a handful of Madison bottle shops for a couple of years now. My four-pack of 12-ounce cans cost $11.49 at Trixie’s Liquor.
Booze factor: 5% ABV.
Up close: Summer Squishy pours a pale straw color with a minimal head that quickly dissipates — a common characteristic for sour ales. If you forgot what was in the can between opening and pouring, a sniff reminds you of that tropical promise, with the coconut particularly forward in the aroma, rounded into a kind of coconut cream character by the vanilla and lactose. With a sip Summer Squishy reveals itself as a beer after all, with all that stuff working together with a what drinks like a nice little blonde ale. Compared with what I was expecting, the adjuncts’ effect is relatively restrained, though that creamy coconut flavor is further forward than the pineapple. The beer is barely sour, and detected very little if any salinity, so the salt might be in there to just balance out all the sweet stuff. And Summer Squishy is balanced, finishing far cleaner than something like this has any right to.
There’s a thing called a beer fest beer — the kind of beer you can enjoy for two to four ounces, but wouldn’t want to drink an entire glass of. You can probably tell I was expecting Summer Squishy to be just that, but I enjoyed all three cans I put down for this review. (Had to save that last can for Saturday.) It ended up representing two common highlights of the Great Taste: the lesser-known beer that punches way above its hype weight, and the clean, low-ABV palate cleanser that cuts through the big barrel-aged beers and acid bombs.
But as much as I enjoyed this little foray courtesy of Oliphant, I’m looking forward to having three-ounce pours of those highlights again next year.
Bottom line: 4 stars (out of 5)
Got a beer you'd like the Beer Baron to pop the cap on? Contact Chris Drosner at chrisdrosner@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @WIbeerbaron.
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August 08, 2020 at 09:00PM
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