Samuel Adams Cranberry Lambic
Sam Adam's Cranberry Lambic comes out but once a year, and only as part of the Sam Adams Winter Classic mix pack. It's a fairly sweet beer, with a strong wheat backdrop to a syrupy sweet cranberry taste. Putting aside all external factors and just rating this on the beer, I'd say it's fairly average -- different from most beers, but average in the sense that it doesn't stand out as being really good or really bad. However, I think of it more fondly, in part because it's not overexposed and I can look forward to just having two each year as part of the mix pack. The other thing that's nice about this beer is that it's holiday beer with a very traditional holiday ingredient. There are a lot of winter seasonals that are brewed to be particularly malty or to have a higher alcohol content to stand up to the winter chill, and many of them are nice enough, but they don't really make me think about Christmas or snow or anything wintery per say. Cranberry is a food with a really strong cultural association with Christmas time and winter, going back even to pre-Christian times. In a way, this is sort of winter's equivalent to the fall pumpkin ales. It has a traditional well-known taste of the season brewed into a seasonal beer. There aren't many winter beers out there that approach things quite that way. Maybe somewhere out there there's a peppermint flavored beer. The downside to this beer is that there isn't really anything to balance the sweetness. To me, a wheat beer is best when it has something to play off of with a more bitter or sour element, such as extra hops or lemon juice or something of the like. This is really just sweet on top of sweet (and with bonus sweet maple syrup, which does earn points for being relatively unique), which means one has to be in the mood for it. Cranberries can be tart sometimes, but I don't taste that element in the beer. It's just sweet. When one is in the right mood, though, this is a good beer to have around. The Boston Beer Company plays this one just about right -- it's perfect to have a couple bottles thrown into the winter mix pack once a year, because of how perfect it is for the season. If they were saying 6 packs of it in July, I'd pass, but as things stand, it's actually one of my favorite beers in the winter classics pack. Update: Now it's own seasonal 6-pack and no longer included in the winter mix pack.