Jolly Pumpkin La Roja

Brewed by Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales
Style: Sour Ale
Dexter, Michigan USA

2-24-08 bottle shared at tasting.
Nice sweet cherry smell with some fun funk in there. Thick red amber with some nice sediment and thin bright white head. Sweet and sour taste that is actually pretty well balanced. High carbonation. My only real complaint is the how thin it is - I want more depth and body.

Pours a dark amber color with foamy white head. Excellent aroma of oak, whiskey, vanilla, sour cherry, wood and dark fruit. Oak whiskey flavor along with sour cherries and dark fruit are an amazing compliment to its spicy amber flavor. Amazing!

Pours a cloudy brownish red color with foamy off white head. Smell is funky, tart cherry and some musty vinegar. Taste is funky, dry, fruity, with some cherry and very faint sweetness, but predominantly dry. Decent, but certainly didn’t blow me away.

Cloudy reddish-orange with brown creamy head leaving patches of lace. Sour cherry, plum, bit of funk and SweetTarty notes. Nice. Sweet and sour flavors playing on the palate, dusty cherry, SweetTarts and slight acidic twang. Pretty drinkable while still being interesting.

Bottle. Pours a beautiful hazy red with a thick cream colored head. Great twangy sour malt and fruity(green apple) aroma. I did not have the highest expectations for this beer as there have only been 2 U.S. brewed Belgian sours (Russian River Sanctification and New Belgium La Folie) that I have thought rivaled the Belgians (Rodenbach). This is no exception. It has elements of a great beer, tartness, fruitiness, and spice. But, there is a sharpness to the flavor that I cannot get past. Maybe this is a problem bottle, and maybe I will try again to be fair, but this one leaves a lot to be desired.......As this beer warmed, it smoothed slightly, making it more enjoyable, but still not great. The sour tartness improved with temperature, but the sharpness still exists, just to a very slightly lesser extent. It is very close to being an Excellent beer in my opinion.

750 bottle: Pours amber with a very large head. Very tart flavor (not really sour). Slight fruity flavor. Very good.

750 bottle poured into a snifter has a semi transparent chestnut color with good active carbination and an initially thick white head that slowly faded back to a lace like layer on the surface. aroma has such a pleasant funky sour, apple, cherry, banana, and yeast. many nice silky layers of smell. mouth feel is a silky heavy carbonated cider. flavors just come at you with sour cherry, champagne yeast, sweet spice, and over ripe fruit galore. very dry but it sets up the taste buds for the sour assault. flavors of fruit combined with the wood switch the flavor about as it was drank. my first jolly pumpkin tried, i will be back for more.

Sour cherry and grape aroma. The pour was a deep amber with a tan head. Flavors of sour fruit, slight sweetness at the start that faded at swallow. Over time the bitterness increased. Fruit flavors of pear, slight banana, cherry.