beer_name: Samuel Adams Cherry Wheat
text: Dried apricot that appears crystal clear with indirect lighting and significantly hazy with an infusion of sunlight. It's definitely an interesting visual effect. The pale oatmeal colored cap is attractive. It resembles a windswept mesa as it deflates, and leaves a fair amount of sudsy lace behind. There's no shortage of cherry in the nose. In fact, it smells so much like sweet cherries that there's no room left for it to smell like beer. It may not be the overpowering cherry bomb that some cherry lambics are, but there's no doubt what fruit was used. I'll have to give credit to BBC, they didn't do this one halfway. As to the question of artificial cherry versus actual cherry juice, it's sort of in the middle. I'm definitely not as impressed with the flavor as I am with the appearance and the aroma. Whereas the nose is 95% cherries and 5% beer, the flavor is much more the latter than the former. SA Cherry Wheat tastes like what a wheat ale flavored with cherry should taste like (in a general sense at least). It doesn't hang together for me though. The base beer is too grainy and rough and tends to dominate the fruit. It seems to me that a more neutral wheat ale, or even a pale ale, would have been a better choice. I also pick up a faint metallic tang and I can't shake the impression that the beer needs salt. As it warms, the cherry flavor takes on an increasingly artificial, almost medicinal quality. The mouthfeel is light-medium, is slightly chalky (odd) and heads toward watery on the finish. Cherry Wheat may be my least favorite Samuel Adams offering to date. If my memory is accurate, I even thought the much maligned Cranberry Lambic was better. With a major tweak or two this could be an okay fruit beer. In its present form, no thank you.