Drink News Liefmans Fruit
We try out a new fruity beer
Drink News: Liefmans Fruit
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Chances are that most people who drink fruity beers don’t know the half of what goes in to making them. Your traditional fruit beers are created in Belgium using beer brewed in open tanks – actively encouraging spores from the outside to get in and flavour it. If you drank this beer without fruit added, it’s quite an acquired taste – sour, bitter and a little like cider. For them that love it, it’s an amazing complex drink, for others it’s just damn odd.
Anyway, once they’ve got this base, the people at breweries like Liefmans age the beer with fruits, allowing the natural flavours and sweetness of the cherries, strawberries, raspberries and so on to change the taste of the beer.
Liefmans Fruit is based on the traditional cherry (or kriek, for your Flemish-speakers) base, but then has strawberry, raspberry, blueberry and elderberry added for good measure.
The result is a sweet, soft, summery flavour that doesn’t really contain any of the tart pungency of the beer’s original source. It also contains a mere 99 calories in a 25cl bottle, which is good if you’re watching your weight. Like most low-calorie product, we suspect that Liefmans Fruit is being pitched firmly at the female audience.
The folks at Liefmans are actively encouraging us to make it the perfect summer drink by drinking it – shock horror – over ice. While most beers taste, quite frankly, shit over ice, the way that Liefmans is brewed means that all the nasty stuff that happens to most beer when ice is added, is avoided. What you actually get is the ice bringing out more of the fruit and creating flavours akin to rose wine, but at just 4.2% abv, so you can drink loads more of it.
Which is very handy over the summer, no?
Liefmans Fruit is available from Waitrose priced £1.60 per bottole, and at selected bars. www.liefmans.be
Posted on Wednesday 23rd June 2010
TG
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