Beer: Rainbownade
Brewery: Evil Twin Brewing (Brooklyn, NY)
Style: IPA- International
7% ABV / 50 IBU

I feel the same way about fruit beers as Torben Ulrich feels about latter day Metallica: I would say ‘delete that.’ With a mix of grapefruit, passion fruit, mango, raspberry and blueberry flavors, Rainbownade has the cloying sweetness of a fruit beer—a punch-drunk Hawaiian Punch. If smelling beer was as important as the act of actually drinking beer, this collaboration between Evil Twin Brewing and Sweden’s Ominpollo (made possible because the two share the same rental brewery space, Dorchester Brewing Company), Rainbownade would be a success; the nose is floral and fragrant and inviting. Both Evil Twin and Ominpollo have shown themselves to be capable of wildly innovative things, but Rainbownade is too far from either of their core competencies.

Ostensibly, Rainbownade is a fruited IPA, but it doesn’t taste like an IPA in the least, and the only thing the hops contribute are an acrid bitterness that sticks to the palette after each sip. It’s also aggressively carbonated, which, when paired with the dominant grapefruit flavor, makes Rainbownade come across as a nightmarish hard soda/hard seltzer hybrid. The color is a lie too! It looks like a New England Pale Ale or Milkshake IPA with its occluded orange-brown color, but Rainbownade just ends up tasting like Zima, if Zima was still being manufactured, of course, and made with water from the Hudson River. Because the definition of folly is to do the same thing over and over again, I bailed early on this brew. 30 minutes after feeding the rest of Rainbownade to my garbage disposal, I had but one regret: I could still taste it on my tongue.