Ithaca Apricot Wheat

Brewed by Ithaca Beer Company
Style: Fruit Beer
Ithaca, New York USA

Lightly hazed blonde with a thin white head. Light clean apricot aroma. In moouth, a smooth apricot ale, but the fruit is rather artificial. Light bodied quaffer. Free taster. August 26,2006 at Greene’s Tavern.

Sampled at the Odds and Ends Tasting at Dogbrick’s. Golden color with a small beige head. Apricot aroma. Very strong apricot flavor.

12 oz bottle; poured a light straw colour with a medium head that disappeared while large anxious bubbles streamed to the top. Aroma is light apricot (maybe more than light...it reminded me of taking the top off of my grandmother’s homemade apricot jam jar). Sweet malt undertones but it’s all apricot. I am concerned that it might be synthetic flavour or something else but the commercial descritption attests otherwise. Flavour is a tangy wheat with just the lightest of apricot at the tail end of it. It’s rather soft. It’s nice and not overpowering. Fruit beers really aren’t my thing but this is alright.

(draft) White head atop clear straw body. Aroma is moderately sweet, apricot, some honey. Taste is medium sweet, apricot, light banana. Light body with light stickiness.

Draft at Colter Bay in Buffalo NY. Not much aroma, but what I could get was wheat malt and apricots. Flavor is pretty much what you would expect. Lots of apricot flavor, weak malt backbone, not much sweetness. Thin refreshing finish. A lawnmower beer.

Hazy golden in color with a small white head. Mild aroma and flavor of apricots and not much else. Grainy malt charcater, very unassuming beer that just never comes acorss.

Well usually I stay away from wheat beers with fruit because usually one could barely taste the fruit. Hwever, this is the opposite, too much apricot. Bottle poured budweiser color wiht som lacing and visble carbonation bubbles. The aroma is all apricot or more like apricot syrup. This almost smells too much like apricot. Same in the taste no beer flavors, just apricot. Feel is slimy for such a light bodied brew. That apricot aftertaste stays for a while as well.

I was nervous when I received this one to sample. It was purchased outside of Buffalo and was my first ever taste of a fruit beer. The aroma versus appearance was perplexing to me. It looked like beer, but smelled distinctly of apricots. I must admit that appricots are not my favorite fruit. The first two gulps taste like a thick wine cooler. After the third gulp the apricot flavor became ad nauseum. Bottom line for me is that the flavor reminded me of what my beer would taste like if one of my kids poured their Juicy Juice box into my mug. If a friend hadn’t bought the beer for me to try, I would have poured it out. I can’t recommend this one.