Sam's Wicked Summer: Summer Ale by Samuel Adams

For a business named "Boston Beer Company", they sure do produce a lot of boozy drinks that are not beer. It appears that their Truly hard seltzers are all the rage these days and make up the bulk of their sales. This taken together with their also popular Twisted hard iced teas and Angry Orchard hard ciders means that poor Sam Adams beers make up a rather small percentage of total sales for the company. And now they're making alcoholic Mountain Dew which is apparently rather popular.

While beer isn't the big performer, I don't know if Boston Beer is brewing less of it or if they're simply brewing a lot more seltzer and whatnot.

Their beery line-up is in near constant flux seemingly because of a need to jump on every craft beer bandwagon. I don't keep a sharp eye on their offerings but it feels like every time a particular variation of an IPA becomes popular, Sam Adams is all over it like a fly on shit and releases 3 or 4 versions. Beyond IPAs, Sam Adams has some fine beers. I like Boston Lager quite a bit, though I've heard they have tweaked it. Sam ’76 (which appears to be called Wicked Easy now) led me onto the path of refreshment a few summers ago when I was in Indianapolis and it was quite balmy out. I suppose my favorites, though, are their winter seasonals. Winter Lager and Alpine Lager are fine brews for snowy days. The former as well as the white ales they offer in the colder months feature the fruits and spices we associate with Christmas cookies and mulling and so they have that holiday taste which offers a nice break from hops.

But those beers are months away and 80+ degree highs are here. That means it is time to drink Oktoberfests. Ha! I keed, I keed. I recently took a break from my summer standards (mainly Bubbler and Kid Kölsch) and bought some Sam Adams' Summer Ale for the first time in a while.

Summer Ale, a wheat ale, is like the younger sibling of their winter seasonal Cold Snap, also a wheat ale, which features a whole host of ingredients beyond the ones we usually think of when we think of beer. It has citrus zests, bits of flowers, and spices such as the highly uncommon Grains of Paradise. Summer Ale pares the unusual ingredients list down to the citrus zests plus some Grains of Paradise.

Grains of Paradise are the seeds of a West African plant that is a member of the ginger family. They taste a bit like ginger but with more of a woody component, to my tongue. I've purchased them at The Spice House in the Milwaukee Public Market but have never seen them for sale in Madison, though they must be around somewhere.

There is much about beer chemistry that escapes me. I learned way back in the olden times that wheat, as a rule of thumb, produces a bigger head than barley. Proteins or some such thing. And so, with that little tidbit of knowledge I have since gone on and assumed every wheat beer will have this big fluffy pillow of foam on top and, without fail, I am shocked – SHOCKED! – when a wheat beer doesn't despite it having happened countless times.

Well, count Summer Ale in this group that shocks. The head was naught but a small, white disc of foam. ☹ Otherwise, the beer looked delightful with its refulgent yellow hue that had a slight haziness to it. For me, the beer smelled of wheat and the woody bit of Grains of Paradise with a little citrus underneath.

As expected from a summer beer, it had a fairly light body along with ample fizz. Again, wheat and Grains of Paradise were most noticeable with the spice having a more gingery flavor to them in addition to the woody/earthy aspect. The citrus was more prominent than in the aroma with an emphasis on the lime. I didn't taste much in the way of hops until the finish when a little peppery hop flavor was joined by a mild bitterness. The citrus came closer to the front and gave my sip a bit of tartness at the end.

I quite like this stuff. It's mellow and refreshing with the citrus being an accent flavor instead of sitting front and center. And the Grains of Paradise are novel and tasty and they work well with the wheat and fruit. I like it that there's something different here that isn't simply a tropical fruit pulled from obscurity on some island for the sake of novelty. Refreshing restraint at its finest.

Junk food pairing: Pair Sam Adams Summer Ale with a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos.