Jason Moore
The gose style has been all the rage the last couple of years, due in large part to the popularity of Westbrook’s Gose. The release of that beer and the amount of press it received caused a flooding of the style onto the craft beer market. The stark reality of it all is this; some people clearly have mastered the style and pump out a great product and others are clearly trying to capitalize on the “hype” that the resurrection of this once forgotten brew has created. Gose is a German-style wheat beer that was traditionally brewed with salt and coriander and was low in alcohol to offer a refreshing and thirst quenching style of beer for warm days.
Odell has jumped on the gose train and has added another element, blackberries, to the mix. According to an interview with Odell’s brewer, Tony, he was looking to produce a refreshing beer for summer that was easy drinking.
I pour Odell’s Bombeere Blackberry Gose; into a tulip glass and in different lights I can pick up orange, amber and purple hues inside the glass. A very thin white ring of bubbles hugged the outside of the glass, but there is little carbonation even when the beer is poured harder than normal into the glass.
I take in several deep whiffs of the beer to try and decipher what I am smelling, and to see if I could dig deeper into the aromas of the beer, but frankly there just isn’t much going on in it. I get some pale malts, wheat and a mildly unpleasant “skunkiness” somewhere mixed in. What is most noticeable about the smell was the lack of both sourness and any type of discernible berry aromas.
Unfortunately the taste follows much of the nose—it’s just a really muted beer overall. It’s like a run of the mill “Lite Beer” with a drop or two of lime juice or lactic acid perhaps? I don’t pick up any saltiness, any sourness or any fruit. A really disappointing representation of what has become a very fun style of beer to drink. It would be interesting to know the amount of blackberries used in the brew because there is absolutely zero characteristics from the fruit.
