Tonight we drink a wild ale from Italy -- Rubus from Birra del Borgo. This one caught my eye because the bottle was really cool. Evidently I like the way Italians shape their beer bottles. Remember the Baladin post? I liked the shape of that bottle, too.
I popped the cap off the bottle and poured it into my trusty tulip glass. It poured out with absolute no head…like none…it looked so strange. The beer was beautiful in the glass -- a ruby-hued liquid. It smelled strongly of raspberries…very appealing. There was also the tiniest hint of malt sweetness. I gave it a good swirl and sipped it.
All I could think was WTF!?! My beer was bad. What happened to the delicious raspberry scent of this beer? Why did it taste so funky? To the Interwebz I went! Turns out that Rubus is a wild ale. The bottle is downstairs in my growing collection of empties and I’m too lazy to double-check, but I am fairly certain that the label didn’t state anything about it being a wild ale or, if it was, it was in Italian. So that would explain a lot. Now that I knew I was drinking a wild ale, the taste made so much more sense.
There was the tiniest bit of carbonation - at times it looked quite flat. Once you got past the tart citric flavor, there was some raspberry underneath. It also had a mildly funky sourness - almost like burnt lemons. I expected it to finish drier - but instead it was refreshing, which left me wanting more. Hopefully Whole Foods still has a few bottles hanging around the beer cooler!
And on that note, I wish you good night. Cheers!
p.s. This beer is filed under “Bizzare” on the Birra del Borgo website. Why does that make me so happy?
I don't understand how an interwebz definition of a beer can change your "this is bad" to "I want more." Wild ale, indeed.
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