Lightweight Fruit Beer
Written: Sep 21 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Easy to drink
Cons: Watery; Almost no hop taste
The Bottom Line: This beer product is sweet, fruity, and easy to drink. But it's too lacking in basic beer quality to recommend.
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| Bryan_Carey's Full Review: Abita Purple Haze |
Abita Brewing Company is a Louisiana- based brewing operation located in Abita Springs, about 30 minutes northeast of New Orleans. This company produces about ten different beer products, with four of them brewed and sold on a year- round basis. Among these four is what is probably Abita's most popular product and the first one I ever tried from this brewery. It's called Purple Haze, a wheat beer with added raspberry flavor.
Basic Characteristics of This Beer:
Purple Haze pours to a copper/orange color with a pinkish hue and an aroma of fruit and grain. There is very little foaming action, and what little there is fades away in less than one minute.
This is a wheat beer, and the added wheat is evident with each swallow. The other dominant flavor is raspberry, which gives the beer a taste that leans toward the sweet side. There are hints of yeast flavor, but almost no hop taste at all. The finish is watery, with no bitterness of any kind.
Real raspberry puree is added to each batch of Purple Haze, along with barley, wheat, German yeast, and hops to produce this fruity brew. Alcohol level is average, weighing in at 4.75 percent by volume.
Food Compatibility:
Given the emphasis on the fruit, this is the type of beer that would go well with fruity dessert foods, salads, and light appetizers. And since it tends to be on the lighter side of the scale, its refreshing characteristics make it a good choice as a summertime quaffer.
Final Thoughts:
Abita Brewing Company has been around since 1986, making it one of the older craft- breweries in America. I have just recently began to discover some of Abita's other products besides Purple Haze. For a long time, Purple Haze seemed like the only Abita product I could locate. Now, with the brewery's growing presence and its expansion of marketing, new Abita products are appearing on the store shelves.
Purple Haze was the first Abita product to ever touch my lips and if you've ever sampled a bottle, it's east to see why Abita chose this as one of its flagship products. This beer is very easy to drink with almost no hop flavor at all and it leaves almost no aftertaste. The fruity, easy drinkability and the empty, watery finish make this beer a popular choice among those who want to drink a beer that doesn't really taste that much like beer. I hate to bring up the stereotype, but Purple Haze is a product that is commonly referred to as a "chick's beer". Women usually don't prefer the spicy flavor of hops or a heavy aftertaste and they tend to like beer that's light and fruity. Purple Haze fits all of these characteristics.
Raspberry flavor and wheat are just about all you taste in this beer product. The raspberry sweetness isn't overdone, which is good, but the sweet fruit flavor is definitely there and it dominates the tasting experience. The beer has a distinctly watery mouthfeel, making it easy to drink and thirst- quenching, just like you would expect a light, watery beer to be.
With a name like "Purple Haze" and all the images that those words conjure up, I was expecting a more robust brew; a medium to heavyweight beer with lots of body. Instead, Purple Haze is a lightweight chump; easy to drink, but with too few positive qualities to be considered a great beer. I'm going to give this beer a rating of two stars, due to its weak, flimsy body and water- like qualities. Ordinarily, a beer with qualities such as these would be awarded a one- star rating. But Abita deserves at least two stars because it is, at least, a beer with some discernable character. It may not have much, but the combination of raspberry and wheat make it more sophisticated than the typical light brew, like Miller Lite or Coors Light.
The fact is that the majority of the public would probably like this beer for the very same reasons that I don't like it: thin body, lack of hop flavor, watery finish. That's what makes Purple Haze a tough beer to rate. Beer connoisseurs will likely pass on this one, but most anyone else in the general public will probably enjoy Abita Purple Haze. It's fruity and easy to drink, and that should be enough to win the approval of most consumers.
Recommended:
No
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