Brewery: Huyghe
Location: Melle, Belgium
ABV: 4.2%
Version: Bottled (250ml)
Source: Courtesy of BeerMerchants.com

I must admit that I approached Fruli with no small sense of trepidation and a fair dollop of reluctance, on the grounds that I’m pretty much convinced – based on a couple of earlier encounters that didn’t go well – that Fruit Beer just isn’t my cup of tea. So, could Fruli be the one to make me change my mind..?

Brewed by Belgian craft-brewery Huyghe, Fruli is part of a stable of flavoured beers that includes the Floris range, as well as Mongozo, a banana-flavoured beer that formed the basis for one of those aforementioned earlier encounters: it was absolutely awful. Worth noting though, that Huyghe also brew the Delirium twins – Tremens and Nocturne (more on that second one in a later Tasting Notes post) as well, so they claw some points back in my book for those two.

So, to the moment of truth: was Fruly strawberry beer going to be a sipper or a spitter? Would I savour it or sink it?

Cracking open the bottle released a powerful whiff of strawberry mikshake concentrate (you remember that Nesquik stuff from when you were a kid?) that filled the room in seconds (startling the cat and causing the missus to pull her “WTF is that?” face… not the best start). It poured with lots of fizz, resulting in a frothy head atop an opaque reddish-brown-verging-on-pink body.

Girding my loins and bracing my palate, I lifted the glass… and was pleasantly surprised to find that, once released from the confines of the bottle, the aroma settles down to something much more akin to that of proper, fresh strawberries. And then there was a second surprise in store: it actually tasted okay.

I mean, it wasn’t delicious and I don’t think I’d want to drink it on a regular basis, but yeah, it was okay. And once I’d performed some minor mental gymnastics and started thinking of it as some sort of strawberry cider, (or strawperry?) then I found I could actually finish the glass. I might have had trouble if there had been much more than 250ml to get through, I have to admit. But as a novelty act, a change from the usual, something a little different? Not too bad.

So, there you go. I’m still not even halfway converted to the Cult of Fruit Beer, but I will concede that maybe there’s something more to some of them than just sugar syrup (although Mongozo remains very firmly in the ‘do not touch, with or without bargepole’ category – sorry, Huyghe).

Thanks once again to Phil at www.beermerchants.com for sending this one along for me to sample.