St. Ambroise Framboise

Brewed by McAuslan Brewing
Style: Fruit Beer
Montreal, Canada

Pours a watery red with no head & some minimal lacing. Aroma is leafy raspberry, very thin and green. Tastes equally watery and thin, bitter and tea-like, more like it was made from the leaves of a raspberry plant than the actual berries themselves. Thin with passable carb. Weak and uninteresting.

Five bucks for this bottle, and all you get for this money is a muddled blend of raspberry syrup and bland, vague malts. Didn’t notice the "sun-ripened hops", which makes sense because hops don’t ripen and all hops are grown outside anyway. Whether they are merely trotting out their old raspberry beer in a pretentious package or not I don’t know, but charging real money for this blend of bland is criminal. They better not do this with my oatmeal stout!

Pours a clear ruby color with a medium but diminishing pink bubbly head. Aroma of tart raspberries and mild sweetness. The flavor is like the aroma, tart rapsberries and sweetness, the malt is also present. The body is light and liquorous and the carbonation is medium. It’s not bad but gets kind of boring after a while.

Slightly clouded red body topped by a short-lived pink head. Aroma of wood and raspberry pastry. Taste is better than expected although I should specify that I expected it to be bad. The advertised raspberries sit on top of crisp/crunchy malts. The fruity flavours are seedy more than juicy. Some tartness but less than expected for the style. Body is rather thin. Finish is surprisingly hoppy and its bitterness doesn’t work very well with the fruity acidity. Refreshing more boring than anything else. Almost $6 (tax incl) for a 341ml is way too much. It’s not the first time I pay $6 for a boring beer although usually there’s a stainless pole in the room.

Belle mousse abondante. Doux parfum de framboise. Goût peu prononcé. Peu d’effervescence.

341ml Bottle in a Sexy Tube: What tremendous packaging, you almost can’t help but purchase it! They figured out a way to make me buy another fruit beer after having swore off them. The pour was cloudy and a pinkish-red, low level of foamy head. The aroma is heavy in raspberry, which is good, with hints of yeast and some spicy elements. All downhill from here - this is heavily carbonated and thick in berries. I’d hoped they’d treat it more like their Apricot Wheat with some subtle fruit and decent hopping, but instead the fruit is more at the forefront with little to find elsewhere. Not my thing.

Sampled draught at the Mondial de la Bière in Montreal, 2006. Dark purple-red in color, with little retained head and no lacing....nicely balanced sweet-sharp fruity nose, hints of biscuit, but very simple if not pedestrian overall....the body is tart and sour predominantly, rather thin and lacking in a real malt background but for a touch of dry cookie dough....becomes pretty jammy and syrupy towards the finish, and a nasty metallic edginess intrudes on the otherwise tolerable finish, becoming really harsh as the sample warms to cellar temp....I had trouble finishing this, what a bummer from this fine brewery.

Ruby red colour with a nice retaining head. Aroma is raspberry and some malts. Flavour is light raspberry with some caramel malts but just doesn’t seem to blend seemlessly. Finishes syrupy.