For too long, fruit beer has borne the burden of too many adjectives—too much tortuous explanation for every technique borrowed from a different tradition. Fruited, kettle-soured Berliner-style weisse? Fruited sour milkshake IPA? Come on. That’s just fruit beer—and fruit beer is a beautiful thing to be.
We’re long past the days when it seemed like every brewpub had to make a bog-standard raspberry wheat—the days when brewers were told (cringe with me now)that they had to make one “for the ladies.”
Now, we know better. The beer world has evolved—and so has fruit beer, thanks to a heartier embrace of fruit flavors and greater knowledge about how to achieve them in the brewhouse. Brewers have been trying and teaching each other a lot of tricks over the past couple of decades, and they’re all fair game.