Santa Fe Sangre de Frambuesa

Brewed by Santa Fe Brewing Company
Style: Fruit Beer
Santa Fe, New Mexico USA

In the bottle at the 2008 Crescent Moon Summer Beer Fest. Pours reddish purple with a cloudy medium thick pink head. Big raspberry fruit aroma - are there cherries in here also? Has a big alcohol burn and a medicinal finish. Flavors are both sweet and tart. This is good, but not great.

10th October 2008. GABF. I must of had the lite version as it was clocking in at a mere 10.0% abv! Hazy brown beer.Champagne crisp palate. Plenty of raspberry - finishes slightly bitter, still with that champagne crispness and dryness and with yet more raspberry.

Bottle 2668 thanks to Linda D. Clear bright copper color-very pretty.Nose is very fruity, raspberry, sweet. Taste is very sweet, fruity, with a high alcohol presence-a bit unusual for a fruit beer. Body is sticky and chewy. An unusual beer-not quite a "belgian" style frambozen as it’s not dry. Definitely a sipper.

Nice red color with a pink head. Aroma has a lot of raspberries, some tartness. Flavor is sweet and fruity, very noticeable raspberry and nice carbonation. Pretty big too, not a wimpy fruit beer, a bit of alcohol on the finish too.

750 ml bottle. Bottle # 245. Sharp raspberry aroma. Amber red body with white head. Has a good raspberry flavor, fruity, doesn’t have the sharp tartness of some fruit beer which was good for me. Does have some alcohol warming effect on the body. Good brew.

750 ml bottle - thanks riverside!! bottle #241; light red and clear, booze and cherries on the nose with spicy and fruity flavors; a little hot, but quite tasty with dry bone finish; kind of like a raspberry vodka type of drink

Sampled at 2008 Sunfest. Raspberry nose, very warm going down - no way to disguise the high alcohol content on this beer. Cranberry in color with super raspberry flavor.

Bottle 243 of 3156; Sampled July 2009
Well, I always seem to have one or two of this in the back of the beer fridge. I beer I am absolutely dreading opening. The last one was Dogfish Head’s Fort, similarly again is another, likely too sweet, raspberry beer. A solid pour nets me a frothy, three-finger thick, pink tinged, dirty off-white colored head. The beer is a deep, dark plum red color that shows a clear, bright red color when held up to the light. Sweet, candied raspberry notes are the first thing I notice about the aroma. No matter how hard I try though, I can’t really notice anything else about the nose; there is perhaps a touch of alcohol warming here, but this is actually fairly tame considering the strength of this beer.

The beer is not quite as sweet as I had feared; in fact it is quite dry for a beer of this strength. Up front there is a light raspberry note, but unfortunately this just takes a wrong turn somewhere. The finish is actually foul tasting; it tastes of rotting raspberries and chemically harsh raspberry extract. A bit of hot alcohol in the finish even adds a touch of tartness (though this light tartness is also likely added by the raspberries). The base beer isn’t overly noticeable here (this tastes mostly of rancid raspberries and vodka), but there is a touch of toasty malt character that comes through from time to time. This beer is actually pretty light bodied (especially given its strength) and this couples pretty well with the effervescent carbonation, but somehow it still leaves me wanting a bit more (this is likely the fault of the flavor more than anything, but I can’t stop it from influencing the texture as well).

The aroma of this beer is not bad if you really like raspberries, the flavor however just isn’t something that I want to be drinking, though I might of used a bit of hyperbole is stating how bad it is. How this ever won an award at GABF is beyond me. This beer is not the worst thing ever, but I was certainly rightly afraid to open it up. Santa Fe is brewing some really interesting and tasty beers, unfortunately this is not one of them (though it is interesting I suppose).