North Taiwan Lichee Beer

Brewed by North Taiwan Brewery
Style: Fruit Beer
Wugu, Taiwan

300ml bottle at "I found a cat on street" in Taipei. Sampled 21 April 2009. In a cute bottle with cute colourful label but no smiling girl on it anymore. 4% alc. Served in a wine glass and indeed it looks and tastes more like sparkling wine. It’s clear light orange in colour without head. Lively carbonation. Aroma is pretty striking, sweet and heavy with liichee. Flavour is pretty sweet but still not too much, with little sour notes. Sth what reminds me of non-alcoholic so called wine for kids in Poland. You don’t feel alcohol in it. Interesting to try but I’m rather going further than coming back to this one.

Bottled May 1, best before Nov 1, sampled June 2 (all 2008). Bottle label is cute, a smiling girl on the front in cartoon + pink color border. 4% abv. As soon as you pop the cap the lichee aroma hits you. I’m not a bit lichee fan and this one was sampled because ... well .. how many lichee beers are there in the world? Thats right, not too many. Color is hazy light amber with a decent head. Aroma is lichee and lichee. Taste is decidedly on the lichee, not beer, side of the street, and it seems more like a malt based wine cooler with lichee taste to me. A little sweet, but then again, for the wine cooler crowd that is perfect. All in all an interesting and drinkable beer although I’m not running out tomorrow to buy a case for my cellar.

Coming in a 300ml brown bottle, bottle-conditioned (but I heard it’s pasteurised already...). Bottled on 02/10/07, BB 02/04/08, served chilled in a weizen glass. Appearance: pours a fresh-sugar-cane-juice like murky dark-yellow hue, coming with a fast-retreating white foam and pretty lively carbonation that also dissipates in about one minute. Aroma: besides the dense and rich aroma of condensed lichee juice, underneath runs a flow of sweet-lemonade fruitiness, wild-flowery honey, melted rock sugar, a faint touch of hop resins, and a somewhat weak note of the wheat-beer base. Pretty fruity overall, but slightly too sweet is the lichee aroma that other elements pale before it. Flavour: a richly sweet intake of lichee juice fast introduces its mildly sour-sweet side, then leading towards sweet flower-tea and a mildly dryish hoppy+wheatish aftertaste to mingle with more lichee aroma. Pretty light in the finish, unlike the rich foretaste, leaving an extra tinge of sour-ish yeastiness to entertain the tongue. Palate&Overall: the texture is soothingly carbonated, quite good for a fruit beer, while the body is consistently light against the richly sweet flavour. The downside of using lichee for brewing is that an aftertaste can turn quite "simplistically acidic", but this beer shows a decent balance in the end. Compared with the other lichee beer produced by another Taiwanese micro-brewery (Takau), this one comes a bit too rich in sweet lichee-juice at the expense of more complexity, yet the overall mouthfeel and a clean aftertaste makes up for it. Worth trying if you’ve never tried a lichee fruit-beer!