No Corporate Beer Reviews: Puff Puff Fish (Venom Series)

Beer: Puff Puff Fish (Venom Series)
Brewery: Tripping Animals Brewing Co, (Doral, FL)
Style: Sour – Fruited
6% ABV / N/A IBU

Puff Puff Fish is light, airy and refreshing—a mid-range ABV sour that drinks like a session beer. Daredevil thrill-seekers questing for an epic mouth-puckering experience may be a little put off by the final installment of this upstart brewery’s “Venom Series.” But Puff Puff Fish knows which way the wind is blowing with fruited sours: the sour base provides the framework for experiencing the fruit, and the more radical the combination of fruit, the better.

With sour styles (slowly) on the rise in popularity, Puff Puff Fish embodies a general micro-trend towards tropical sours. Having experienced coconut and pink guava in other sours, the combination of the two is pleasurable, but I really like the addition of lychee, a small Chinese stone fruit with not-overly-sweet white pulp. It’s something that tastes great in a martini, and that is kind of the effect with Puff Puff Fish.

For a series of beers named after nature’s predators, Puff Puff Fish and its predecessors emphasize drinkability. Tripping Animals is a small operation that is only a couple of years old, but the brewery is already making a name for itself with its creative fruited sour and fruity berliner weisse combos. The Miami area brewery seems to have cracked the riddle of how to make accessible styles of beer that are otherwise not universally adored. And if Tripping Animals only did sours, they’d have an impressive line-up, but of course they can brew higher gravity beers and make that look effortless, too.

For more info, check out Tripping Animals Brewing Company here.