Warsaw – Warsaw Beer Festival (Raduga Brewery)

Next up at Warsaw Beer Festival was Raduga Brewery, another one that I haven’t come across during my Polish visits. I liked the Fruit Mate name, very Inbetweeners.

There was certainly a range of colours and textures visible here. From back left to back right and then front left and front right:

(i) Fruit Mate #4 – heaps of kiwi in this and an ingredient that I couldn’t initially work out, but it’s tea…. It was all a bit clumpy and slightly odd, but I was drawn to it despite it being rather medicinal.

(ii) Peach Melba – like a rhubarb and custard sweet, a sourness from the peach and a lingering flavour that I couldn’t identify, but it’s likely fruit of some kind and that’s not a specialism of mine.

(iii) Sour Forest – this is quite tart even for me and I like a heap of sourness, but it’s juicy, thick and tastes of currants. Like a decadent and punchy fruit juice.

(iv) Soft Garden – possibly the least appetising looking beer that I’ve seen, it was positively clumpy and not a pretty colour. There was a taste of banana, maybe apple alongside tastes of lawnmowers and garden sheds.

(v) Fruit Mate #3 – there’s a bit of pineapple and it wasn’t entirely well rounded beer.

(vi) Trapeze – light, fruity but nothing much deeper than that.

I did enjoy these, even though I was sitting in a deckchair trying not to look like an idiot…. The brewery’s output is what I would call rustic, but who wants perfectly rounded beers all the time? There has to be room for experimentation, adventure and ugliness along the way.

Incidentally, look at the state of the Warsaw weather in this short video…. It was too hot yesterday and then we had a little snow blizzard.