I've Got Sunshine in My Stomach: Cage Radler by Victory Brewing Company

I am going to bring my radler mini-marathon to a close today with Cage Radler from Pennsylvania's Victory Brewing.

Victory is a veteran of a thousand craft wars having been formed in 1996. They made the news recently when they became part of Artisinal Brewing Ventures, a holding company that, um, holds, Southern Tier as well. Beyond this, I rarely hear about Victory. I suppose that's misleading. Their Prima Pils is highly regarded but I just don't see their other beers getting mentioned very often. I've not had many of their brews, admittedly, but will attest that Prima Pils is very tasty and they also make a mean Kirsch gose.

I just don't hear about people eagerly awaiting the arrival of a new Victory IPA. Then again, this may just be my narrow window on the microbrewing world. And my understanding is that the brewery does not have a rep in Madison which I'd imagine would limit promotional efforts such as tap takeovers.

My perceptions, however misguided, aside, I was happy to hear earlier this year that Victory would be releasing a radler. I drink a fair amount of them during the summer and finding a good one at a better price than Stiegl would be great. The brewery has a good mix of lagers and German styles and trendier ones such as Citra-laced IPAs and I was confident that they would do a good job.

Completely tangentially, a couple friends came over this past weekend and we sat out on my deck in the 90° heat. I was drinking lagers when a my friend opened a New Glarus variety pack. I decided to give a Moon Man (an APA, I suppose) a shot. It surprised me just how much of a chore it was to drink it. But drink it I did and I even finished the bottle. I immediately grabbed a Cage Radler afterwards to get the taste of all those hops out of my mouth and just to have something better suited to my hot weather quaffing taste.

Victory describes Cage Radler as a blend of lager and citrus. At 3% A.B.V. it seemed to be a real radler instead of a lighter beer with flavoring added. But the fine print says "Beer with lemon extract". D'oh! The bier was a bright, light yellow and, strangely enough, very cloudy. Is the base bier some kind of wheat pils? Or perhaps they just decided to forgo filtering/centrifuging. Regardless this stuff was almost opaque.

To complement the sunny yellow hue, my glass got a big white head on it. It was on the firm side and lasted a while. Again, my mug was dirty and so was lined with bubbles. The first pour cleaned it, however, and it looked much better after that. There was a goodly amount of bubbles inside heading on up.

The aroma was lemomy, as in lemon juice from concentrate. My mind envisioned those green ReaLemon bottles. It has a slight tartness to it. The taste had that same reconstituted lemon juice flavor to it. Citrusy tartness was moderate and there was sweetness which was just a tad stronger than the tartness. The carbonation was bright and tingly and the brew as a whole had a tangy acidity to it.

For the finish the lemony tartness and the sweetness lingered. My mouth was also left with a mild acidic tang. Schaumhaftvermoegen was minimal with just a few spots of foam left clinging.

Cage was by far the best brew to call itself a radler in my recent radler/shandy binge. It was light-bodied and bubbly plus it had relatively little alcohol. However, the lemon extract was disappointing. It didn't taste bad but reconstituted lemon juice has a flavor to me that lacks the bright zestiness of the fresh stuff while also tasting too real to be soda. It doesn't clearly occupy a neat, tidy category. It's juice queer, if you will. Beyond this, though, I really liked how it balanced tartness and sweetness.

I will also mentioned that I did not taste any bier in Cage. This made me dock it a few points but this is not a big deal for me. Sure, it does mean that Cage, had it a better lemon flavor, could not have entered the hallowed upper echelon of radler goodness currently occupied by Stiegl, but first things first.

Junk food pairing: Cage goes well with more traditional junk foods. Try some Lay's Beer 'n Brats potato chips or a bag of white cheddar popcorn.

Meanwhile in Peshtigo: Cherry Radler by Forgotten Fire Brewing Company

My initial encounter with Forgotten Fire was not particularly thrilling. But, like many Americans, I like to root for the underdog. I want this company up in Peshtigo (although the beer is brewed in Stevens Point) to succeed. And so I was eager to give the brewery a second chance and did so recently when I saw their Cherry Radler for sale. It's summer and I'm in media res of a multi-radler expose à la Woodward and Bernstein so the timing was perfect.

To reiterate something I wrote earlier, Stiegl Grapefruit Radler is, to my taste, the apotheosis of the radler. It is a 60-40 mix of grapefruit soda and Stiegl-Goldbräu, a helles lager, and it is fizzy, moderately sweet, and a bit tart. The beer alone is 4.9% A.B.V. while the radler is 2%. So when I saw that Cherry Radler was 4.8% and described on the label as being "beer with natural flavors added", I did not get my hopes up. A radler is, for me, a mixed drink – a cocktail, if you will. Just as one does not distill a martini, one does not brew a radler. Beer meet soda.

If you're not mixing soda and beer at a rate of 50/50 or thereabouts, it's not a radler to me. Sure, you can, say, take a beer and add a splash or two of soda for a refreshing treat. Just don't try to pawn that off as a radler. If you add extract to your beer, it's not a radler. If you age your beer in the barrel that your fruit-flavored extract came in, it's not a radler. Soda meet beer.

Cherry Radler pours a light gold hue that is quite clear. My glass ended up with a pillowy white head of about half a centimeter that last 30 seconds or so. There were lots of bubbles inside my glass apart from the ones clinging to the side. I am going to try a different brand of dishwasher rinse aid hoolie to see if I can get a glass without stuff on the side to attract bubbles. Even if your radler is really an extract-laden beer, it still deserves to at least look pretty as I denounce it as an impostor.

The aroma here was mostly cherry candy. Cherry candy that is bereft of anything resembling a cherry, that is. It reminded me of cherry Twizzlers but less sweet. I also caught just a hint of grain in the smell too.

I must admit to not being surprised that this stuff tasted like a combination of cherry candy and cherry cough syrup. It was fairly sweet but not cloyingly so.

The more medicinal cherry flavor persisted on the finish. There were a few specks of scattered Schaumhaftvermoegen.

If this brew didn't taste like cough syrup, it wouldn't be half bad. It was light and fizzy so it's not without any merit.

According to Robin Shepard of Isthmus, Forgotten Fire is going to be tweaking their recipes in the near future. If and when I receive confirmation of this I will try their brews again. Until then I'm off of Forgotten Fire because the Cherry Radler I drank was just bad. Remember the Sacred Radler Credo: Mix the beer with the soda. How would Buffalo Bill put it? It puts the soda into the beer.

Junk food pairing: Pair Cherry Radler with Jays Hot Stuff potato chips. The faux stone fruit goes well with the earthy, paprika flavor of the chips.

Orange is the New @!$#: Orange Radler by Sprecher Brewing Co.

Glendale's (Milwaukee) Sprecher Brewery is one of the founding fathers of Wisconsin's microbrew scene having been established in 1985. Chris Welch of Trixie's Liquor here in Madison noted last month that the venerable brewery derived 70% of its sales from soda. I don't know where he got that number from but I've heard for some time that Sprecher sells more soda than beer.

This is a real shame considering that Sprecher makes some mighty tasty brews. There are the stalwart Amber (one of my all-time favorites) and Black Bavarian (another classic) plus their seasonals are great too including the current one, Summer Pils.

But for better or for worse – OK, for the worse, in my opinion – Sprecher has seemingly put more effort lately into malternatives than into beer. I am referring to their series of "Hard Craft Soda(s)" which began with root beer – what else? - and has now expanded to six flavors including Hard Apple Pie. And more recently Sprecher has released a line of radlers. It certainly fits the brewery's German image and the radler would seem to be the perfect marriage of libations for a brewery that excels at lagers as well as sodas.

And so I recently purchased some of Sprecher's Orange Radler with grapefruit, peach, and mango rounding out the host of flavors on offer.

Orange Radler poured a lovely light gold hue and was extremely cloudy. The haze was no doubt from the wheat. Yes, Sprecher's radlers are wheat ales with "natural flavoring". Well, the orange one was, anyway. It had a very soda-like head in that it wasn't very foamy and it disappeared quite quickly. There was a fairly large number of bubbles inside heading on up.

As I was diligently examining my glass and the liquid therein visually, I could not miss the brew's aroma. It must have been what John Glenn smelled while orbiting the Earth in a Mercury capsule and needing to quench his thirst – Tang. Nothing says craft thirst quenching goodness like 1950s convenience food.

I was not looking forward to drinking this stuff but I had committed myself to a run of radler reviews so I had to. And actually it could have been worse. Orange Radler was light on the tongue and had a nice fizziness. At first there was the Tang drink mix flavor but it was followed up by a more natural orange juice taste. There was also a bit of tartness that, along with the carbonation and the cold serving temperature, took the edge off the sweetness which was not cloying to begin with. Once the natural flavoring had had its say, it was the beer's turn. A relatively prominent grassy/spicy hop flavor took me by surprise. I mean, any recognizable hop flavor amidst a sea of orange flavoring and juice would stick out like a sore thumb. Lastly there was a little bit of grain to be had as well.

For the finish a mild hop bitterness mingled with the mix of orange for a drier finish than one had any right to expect.

It both saddens and flummoxes me that a brewery which makes such great lagers and great sodas would play against their strengths and come up with this. A grand disappointment. There are some good things here, however, such as the tingly carbonation, the way the beer slyly sneaks into the picture just as the orange flavors think they've got the place to themselves, and that it's not overly sweet. But I should not be tasting instant drink mix here! Sprecher brews a fine orange cream soda already; why do I not taste the orange half of that drink here? Or even better, an orange soda that utilizes juice and tastes more natural. Surely they can brew a fine helles and mix it with their fine soda. Instead they add natural flavoring to a nondescript wheat ale for a brew that comes to 4.5% A.B.V. when it should be much lower, to my mind.

Junk food pairing: When consuming Sprecher Orange Radler, get a bag of Fritos Scoops and fill them with generous amounts of Dean's Sriracha dip.

By the Way, This One's Pink: Paletas Guayaba by 5 Rabbit Cervecería

I am going to continue the aestival brew theme and even stick around my hometown of Chicago for today's review. Yesterday I started things off with Goose Island's Calm Radler and am going to continue today with 5 Rabbit's Paletas Guayaba. "Paletas", the bottle helpfully informed me, are named after the Spanish word for "popsicle".

This is 5 Rabbit putting their characteristic Latin American spin on the radler/shandy epidemic and in this case we have a guava flavored brew. I was pleased to see that it comes in at 3.5%, a wonderfully summery sessionable strength.

Paletas Guayaba is a glorious shocking pastel pink color. It is a wheat cerveza and so I was not surprised that it was quite turbid. I did my level best to pour the Paletas so as to produce a nice head and I was generously rewarded for my effort with a glass adorned with 1"+ of pure cloud white foam. And it lasted as long as the Duracell bunny. The combination of the pink cerveza and white head makes it the Sonny Crockett of brews. (Jan Hammer music is optional.) The brew was so cloudy that I couldn't see inside it so it may have a modicum of effervescence or it might not have had much to speak of.

The aroma smelled of tropical fruit, quite unsurprisingly, but it was not very strong. There was also a really nice fruity tartness, which I appreciated as I had been hoping for something less sweet than Calm. Surprisingly, I caught a little sour funk. No, "brett" was not plastered across the label nor was the scent particularly potent. But it was pleasant and added another layer to the perfumatory profile.

I had to drink my way through the head to get to the cerveza and the foam turned out to be luscious and creamy. The cerveza itself was no slouch in the mouthfeel category either and was quite smooth with the silkiness cut a little bit by a fair touch of carbonic bite. Would you believe me if I told you that guava was the order of the day on the flavor? It was moderately sweet but there was also an equal dose of tartness too.

On the finish the guava sweetness faded to a lingering tartness which brought the proceedings to a fairly dry close. Lacing abounded with big streaks and patches lining my glass.

I am a big fan of 5 Rabbit Cervecería and their use of coffee, chilies, spices, and, yes, tropical fruits. And they deliver here. Paletas Guayaba is light-bodied making it perfect for the dog days of summer. It also has a great blend of sweet fruitiness and tangy tartness along with a heaping dash of carbonation to make it even lighter and fizzy to boot. A perfect summer refresher.

Junk food pairing: Paletas Guayaba goes very well with Kettle Chips Avocado Oil Lime Ranch potato chips. The lime adds a nice tang while the ranch flavoring and fat complement the cerveza's smooth body.

One From the Vine: Calm Radler by Goose Island Beer Company

Now that the temperatures outside have begun to resemble Hades, I tend to look for lighter brews and so often indulge in radlers (and shandies too). The radler is, to my mind, a 50/50isih mix of a light lager and citrus-flavored soda. The legend has it that one Franz Xaver Kugler, a Bavarian innkeeper was beset upon by a horde of bicyclists one June day in 1922 and he began to cut his bier with lemon soda to quench the thirsts of the sweaty, unwashed masses. The German Beer Institute says of the incident, "...some 13,000 cyclists descended upon the Kugleralm and demanded beer. They almost depleted Franz Xaver's stock of brew."

If 13,000 thirsty cyclists couldn't drink Herr Kugler out of bier – even cutting it with soda – just how much bier did this guy have on hand? We're talking the population of Stoughton. He must have had a billion hectoliters. This guy could literally have supplied an army with bier.

Ever since Leinenkugel hit the jackpot with Summer Shandy, many microbrewers have jumped on the bandwagon. I recall asking bartenders at the High Noon and Glass Nickel to mix me a radler on hot summer days 4-5 years ago and was met with a blank look each time. My guess is that things are different today and that the radler is not quite the unknown quantity that it was at that time.

The problem is that American brewers tend to add some flavoring to a light beer whether it be a helles lager or a wheat ale and call it a shandy or radler. (To me, a shandy is beer with ginger beer.) But you mix a shandy/radler, you don't brew it – like a beer cocktail. If your shandy/radler is 4%+ A.B.V. and you have "natural flavor", you're doing it wrong.

The gold standard for radlers to my taste is Stiegl's Grapefruit Radler. It is light, fizzy, and has a great balance of grainy lager goodness and tart-sweet grapefruit soda. And it's 2% A.B.V.

Which brings me to Goose Island's Calm Radler. Calm Radler is the second beer in Goose Island's Fulton & Wood series of limited edition brews this year. (To be bottled?) The first was the excellent Rasselbock. Now, it comes in at a very radler-like 3.0% A.B.V. but it is described as a wheat ale with "natural flavors" added. In this case there is cucumber, mint, and lime. Quite a variation on the traditional radler.

Calm poured a slightly hazy light yellow. I suppose the haze comes from the wheat. Sadly my glass was again afflicted with dishwasheritis or some such thing because bubbles again clung to the side of my glass. The pisser is that I washed it by hand in an apparently vain attempt to avoid this. Curses! Foiled!

I got a medium-sized head that was pure white and faded quickly. In addition to the accursed bubbles on the side of my glass, there were quite a few further in making their way up.

After having had a cucumber Kölsch from Flat12 Bierwerks in Indy a few years back at the Great Taste, I became of fan of cucumber in beer. Here the aroma was of cucumber, mint, and lime and in that order of strength. It certainly smelled refreshing.

As on the nose, so in the taste. Calm has a big cucumber taste while the mint was no slouch either. And the lime trailed in a rather distant third. It was nice'n'fizzy with a soda-like level of carbonation. But it was also endowed with a lot of sweetness – to the point of being cloying. There was so much sugar here that what must have been a very light beer ended up with a medium body.

Calm finished with the sweetness deciding not to go anywhere and instead keep a slowly fading mix of cucumber and mint company. There was no Schaumhaftvermoegen.

The bottle said that there were "hints" of cucumber, mint, and lime. While the lime have been available in hints, the cucumber and mint most certainly were not. They were not accents - they were up front and in your face. I am not a huge fan of mint, but it did complement the cucumber well. It also helps that all of these flavors tasted fairly fresh and real as opposed to some kind of extract. But there is just too much sweetness here. Drink this stuff very cold to cut down on the syrupy taste.

Junk food pairing: Pair Calm Radler with some junk food from the Orient like an Oriental/Asian snack mix. The puffed rice bits will keep your mouth from being mired down in heavy textures while the flecks of seaweed go well with the mint. Another option is wasabi/soy sauce almonds. The wasabi is sharp enough to cut through the sugar while the soy adds a hearty dose of umami.

You Don't Brew a Radler

Earlier this summer I read that Schell was going to be releasing a grapefruit radler. Well, it finally came out but I haven't tried it yet because it's not a radler. It was very disappointing to read that it has 4.6% ABV and basically followed Leinenkugel, Sam Adams, et al. To paraphrase a friend of mine, you don't brew a radler in the same way that you don't distill an Old Fashioned. You mix a radler. Schell's “radler” isn't even what I would consider a session beer. What gives? Don't get me wrong, Schell makes some very fine beer. Indeed, bottles of their brew have been adorning my refrigerator all summer. But their “radler” is a fail.

Since it turned into summer again, I bought me some radler fixins this past weekend.



To be honest, I prefer Capital Lake House for my radlers but Jenifer Street Market had none. (?!) So I went with the next best thing. About 50/50 with the Totally Naked (but 60% soda and 40% Lake House). Grown Up Soda is some fine soda. More tartness and less sweetness.

Good stuff, Maynard.

In Defense of the Shandy/Radler

Greg Koch, co-founder of Stone Brewing posted a short tirade on his Facebook page in reaction to a news article which noted the increasing number of shandies on store shelves. He wrote:

Not satisfied by their declines, the major brand beer companies look to Europe for ways to drive a bigger stake into the heart of beer, faster. http://www.nbcnews.com/business/its-beer-its-lemonade-its-shandy-its-coming-us-6C10095813

Heck, mixing their beer with lemonade, soda pop and other sugary drinks helped the German industrial brewers lose credibility, why shouldn’t the USofA pile into that sinking boat too!

There’s nothing like sending a message to consumers that says “Hey, fed up with beer and or just not in the mood for a ‘regular’ fizzy yellow beer? Let us add HFCS / sugar and flavorings into it for you.” Bam! Instant respect from everyone (if “everyone” means “that MBA guy in the marketing dept charged with analyzing new trends”).

I'm sympathetic – to a point. The "shandies" I see on shelves are lemon flavored beers, not drinks comprised of a 50-50 mix of beer and lemonade/soda. Your shandy should not be 4.5% ABV; it should be 2.8%. So, yeah, MBA types in marketing divisions deserve a ration of shit.

On the other hand, I don't feel that a proper shandy or radler is deserving of scorn. These drinks have been around for a long time and are quite refreshing. Greg Koch should step outside California and/or talk with people other than those who spend an inordinate amount of time on the Beer Advocate forums because not everyone wants to drink a fucking pale ale or one of its cousins, i.e. – APA, IPA, black IPA, Belgian IPA, &c. Considering that Stone seems to be, outside of a handful of porters and stouts, a one trick pony – pale/amber ales and variations thereof – the MBA types at least deserve credit for seeking out something different. Furthermore, not everyone wants to spend a hot summer day drinking a fucking double, imperial, mega-boozy brew. Look at Stone's site and you'll find one session beer. (And for session beers I go with Lew Bryson – 4.5% ABV or less.) One.

On this last point, I notice new trend in craft brewing - India Session Ales. Koch is happy to rip on MBA guys looking for trends but I'll bet a dollar to a doughnut that the existence of these ISAs is all about trends. It has "India" in the name! It's related to the IPA! "Hey, fed up with imperial IPAs or just not in the mood for a 'regular' IPA? Let us remove some of the alcohol for you." Bam! Instant new trend and respect from the Beer Advocate crowd.

I had an ISA over the weekend – Central Waters' Hop Rise. It was pretty tasty but I have to say that I'm not sure if very hoppy beers are sessionable for me. A lower ABV is certainly a big part of the equation but I just can't take that many IBUs in a session.

In Herr Koch's honor, I made a radler last week on a hot day. I used Capital's Lake House and the lemon variety of Grown-Up Soda. GUS' sodas are much less sweet than your run-of-the-mill Coke and Pepsi products and have a nice dry flavor. From what I've read, radlers in Germany are made with soda akin to this stuff as opposed to the Teutonic equivalent of 7-Up.

The result was a very refreshing drink on a hot spring day of 85 degrees or so. I enjoyed every sip which had the dry tartness of the soda sitting next to the balanced malt & hops flavors in perfect harmony. Not too sweet, my tongue wasn't attacked by hops, and it was low in alcohol.

Keeping It Cool

I recently began reading Arnaldur Indriðason's Hypothermia thinking that a murder mystery set in Iceland during the cooler months would be a good way to mentally beat this 90+ degree weather we've been having. Unfortunately, there's precious little about cold weather and snow so far, although that looks to be changing with a storyline a la Flatliners. This being the case, I've been thinking of other bits of entertainment that can make things frosty in the brain box. Since my attempt involved a book, I'll start with those.



You can always start with the adventure of Miskatonic University's Willian Dyer at the mountains of madness, but for sheer cooling power the first tome that comes to mind is The Terror by Dan Simmons. It is a fictional account of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition of 1845 to find the Northwest Passage. His two ships, the HMSes Terror and Erebus, got stuck in pack ice and there were no survivors. Ergo this book is all about men struggling to survive is sub-zero weather. With nearly 800 pages of ice, snow, blizzards, terror, frozen bodies, and more ice and snow, this book will keep you cool in desert conditions.

If you're looking for a quicker fix, may I recommend Jack London's "To Build a Fire". It begins:

Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland.

And chronicles a man hiking the Yukon Trail in bitter cold and his desperate attempts to build a fire before settling into his chilly fate.



More good cyro-fiction in the graphic novel arena is Whiteout by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber. There's a murder at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica and Deputy U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko is on the case. It's a good, solid murder mystery with lots of blizzards. It was turned into a feature film a few years ago starring Kate Beckinsale. While it certainly has cooling power, it was a pretty bad film.



Moving over to the realm of video games we have Alpha Polaris a horror adventure which takes place at an oil research station in Greenland. (I see a theme here.) I've played the demo and it was pretty good, although you don't really get much of a sense of the lurking terror that the Finnish game designers promise. Still, the game should inspire icy thoughts.

There are probably a country ton of movies (besides the dreadful Whiteout) to put you in a glacial state of mind. The first one I thought of was John Carpenter's remake of The Thing, though don't be afraid to watch James Arness in the original from 1951. I've not yet seen the prequel from last year but I don't doubt that it would do the trick.



Next, I'll thrown in a couple audio dramas.

First there is some Doctor Who.



I recall listening to Winter for the Adept for the first time and feeling more than a little chilly as Nyssa finds herself alone in the Alps.

However, for sheer frigid audio, check out Simon Bovey's Cold Blood.





This is the aural equivalent of The Terror. Biotech and oil companies are exploiting Antarctica in 2014 and someone is willing to kill to keep a discovery to herself. Not only does it take place in the freezing cold so you get to hear the wind howling, the characters are always talking about incredibly cold it is. The fact that the story takes place in a bitter, frigid land is never far from your mind. I listened to this story a few summers ago and had to cover myself with a blanket because I felt so cold.



Gamers can get in on the action here too. I don't know of any board games that take place in the ice and snow but, if you're into RPGs, there's always Beyond the Mountains of Madness. Helm the Starkweather-Moore expedition to find out what happened to Professor Dyer and company.

Lastly, there's music. I always think of "South Side of the Sky" by Yes as being a good way to cool things down as it's about the terminal fate of a polar expedition:

A river a mountain to be crossed
The sunshine in mountains sometimes lost
Around the south side so cold that we cried
Were we ever colder on that day
A million miles away
It seemed from all of eternity


So, dear reader, there my tentative list. I suppose I could have catalogued stuff like radio adaptations of At the Mountains of Madness, for example, but figured a couple iterations was enough. Any further suggestions?

Regardless of what entertainment you choose during these hot summer days, you'll need a drink. Might I suggest a Stiegl Grapefruit Radler? I bought a six-pack of it last weekend and it is might tasty. The mix of grapefruit soda and a light lager was extremely refreshing and, at 2.5%ABV, you won't get drunk nor dehydrate yourself.