Beer – #56 – Sawmill Brewing Company – Crystal Wheat Beer
Sawmill Brewing Company – Crystal Wheat Beer. Brewed by Leigh Sawmill Brewing Company in Leigh, New Zealand ,and they style it as a Wheat Ale.
A beer with a flip top lid, 500mls of 4.5% ABV craftiness. As usual it’s buy first think about it later with me and having read about it later I have the trepidation.
Named “Crystal” because of its unique qualities, this beer is made to one of our own special recipes using 50% pilsner and 50% wheat malts. Light amber in appearance with a foaming white head, this beer has unique citrus fruit flavours. There is a hint of spice and a mild bitterness coupled with a medium hoppy aroma. This is a refreshing summer drink that can be enjoyed with a squeeze of lime juice. 4.3 to 4.5% abv
And I’m thinking “what have I done?” It could be a Frankensteins monster of a beer. It doesn’t seem to be what it wants to be.
But it does come with a flip top lid.
So it’s clear like a lager, it has the citrus lemon of an aroma- fleetingly. It even has a a head. And it had a magnificent poppage when I opened it- like it should.
yeah, the confusion of tastes, there is hoppiness, there is a lemonade shandy ness, a confusion of carbonation and a long mouthfeel taste of none of those things. I get an aftertaste of hops, it’s not good.
I am a fan of the wheat beer genre, there should be no mistake on that, and I’ve had a wide range of them. This is down the wrong end of the range. I’d be happy to put it at the end of a firing range and take pot-shots at it, this isn’t a beer that you could straight-face describe as a wheat beer. Or perhaps you can, in New Zealand, the same way you can trademark Radler I assume.
Arbitrarily then I can’t even give this an arbitrary out of some number rating.But I will being 3 from 10 arbitrary things. I might have found another beer that I’ll struggle to finish, and the frugal in me hates that.
The Leigh Sawmill company can do, and do have better beer than this. “The Doctor” for example – not a wheat beer. I’m in doubt about how this beer came into being, I’m not convinced it started as one thing, someone made a mistake and they had to sell it as something with a “special recipe” and they do tell you to add lime juice to give it flavour. Enough said.
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A life just as ordinary 
Agree with you on this one, I struggled on the first glass.
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I know right, it’s not one thing or another, it’s either a mistake of a beer, an bet, or they really think they’re onto something, and I don’t think it’s the last one.
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