Texas Beer Nerd

Here’s another one from the brewery in Abita Springs, Louisiana. This is a raspberry lager, made with real raspberries and no, doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Jimi Hendrix. Normally I stay the hell away from fruit beers because they usually don’t taste like beer. If you’re expecting something like a framboise lambic, which tends to be sweet and tart like soda and/or pie, bubbly like champagne and also very low in alcohol content, with Purple Haze than you might be surprised. This is a fruit beer that…gasp…actually tastes like beer. The raspberry is present enough to make itself known but is not overpowering. It’s more of a slightly sweet, slightly tart accent flavor to the crisp, clean lager taste. In fact, I would say it probably enhances the fairly bland, grain-based flavor of a standard lager. The alcohol content is quite low, less than 5 percent ABV, but is high enough for Purple Haze to still be considered real beer in my eyes, unlike the aforementioned framboise lambic. Supposedly the appearance of the beer matches the name somewhat but I have yet to pour it into a glass to find out. I’ll just have to buy some more to find out.