Commentist Beer Barrel: You Know Who I Like, Is That Pickle Stork

Pickles are a great, great food. On their own, they’re a fantastic low-calorie snack, sharp and bright and zesty and satisfying. They’re also a great ingredient, perfect in, say, yeah right’s Cubano sandwich. I even once had them on a Cubano-inspired pizza, and why on earth are you talking about pickles in a beer review, snow? Is it a metaphor for something, like the cake last week?

No, it’s not a metaphor. I’m talking about pickles because this week, I’m reviewing a beer with pickles in it.

New Braunfels PKL FKR is, at base, a Berliner weiss, a type of low-alcohol, sour wheat beer that’s one of my very favorite styles, a perfect combination of incomparably quaffable and intensely flavorful. I say “at base” because there’s a very big twist: The addition of pickle juice after fermentation. Like most Berliner weissbiers, this one’s a hazy yellow color. Nothing about the beer’s appearance suggests that there’s anything unusual going on here, but take a sniff and you’ll recognize it immediately. The nose almost reminds me more of fresh cucumbers than of actual pickles, which is a little unfortunate for me both because I’m not the biggest fan of raw cucumbers, and because I once had an actual cucumber beer that was just awful. This beer, on the other hand, is not awful. It’s bizarre, but in a way that absolutely works. The brininess of the pickle juice and the sourness from the beer’s lactic fermentation make a great pair.

Now, I don’t often say “I like this, but I couldn’t drink a lot of it.” Almost always, if I like a beer, I can also drink a lot of it, whether it’s aggressively hoppy or sour or even, like, Southern Tier Crème Brûlée, which is just diabetes in a bottle. With this one, though, a little goes a very long way. It’s partly the nose, but it’s also that pickles are just a really intense flavor, and one that I have a hard time consuming a lot of in a way I don’t with sweetness or bitterness or sourness alone. This is a pretty cool beer, but for me it’s much more a curiosity than something for everyday drinking.

lady snow says: It reminds me of deli pickles. I like it!

make it snow says: Does it smell kind of more like fresh cucumbers to you?

lady snow says: Yeah, but I like that. I enjoy cucumber water, so to me that’s good. What’s the ABV on this?

make it snow says: Nothing on the label, but Untappd says 3.2%.

lady snow says: Oh, that’s not high at all. That’s a Russian soft drink.

tl;dr: If you like pickles, this sure does taste like pickles.

Grade: Hey, why isn’t Tunisia better at beach volleyball? The whole country is a beach.

make it snow is an alot of beer who got drunk yesterday and livetweeted a twelve-hour game of Oregon Trail. He’s pretty tired! At press time he was washing down his pickle beer with a habanero beer.