Beer: Birthday Zombie Annihilation
Brewery: KCBC – Kings County Brewers Collective (Brooklyn, NY)
Style: Sour – Other
7% ABV / 0 IBU
Birthday Zombie Annihilation is a special can release to celebrate Kings County Brewers Collective’s 5th birthday. Yeah, that name has now taken some unfortunate dimensions during a global pandemic, but who would’ve predicted that when KCBC dropped the original Birthday Zombie fruited sour back in 2017. Since then, things have only gotten boozier and more fruit-forward. Sour times call for sour beer, and five years of operation—40% of which has been during that pandemic which has also re-shaped how craft brewers are doing business—is totally worth raising a glass.
Birthday Zombie Annihilation is also best experienced in a glass, like a goblet or something with a wide mouth. That’s so you can take it the aroma as you drink it, because the smell is really where the Madagascar vanilla bean and milk sugars really come through. Sours, overall, offer a but more to look at than other styles, often due to pigmentation from the fruit or additives/dyes used to heighten the experience. Color-wise, Birthday Zombie Annihilation is pretty and a little cloudy, like a fruit lambic or a Berliner weisse mixed with berry syrup.
One slight knock on KCBC’s birthday brew is that there’s a little too much going on with the incorporation of strawberry, pink guava, Alfonso mango, wild blueberry, black raspberry and Meyer lemon. I taste the berries (particularly the strawberry and raspberry) and the Meyer lemon only; mango and guava pair well together but are more muted flavors in sours and will always be drowned out by the tartness of berries. But the can art, which references the original poster for Dawn of the Dead, totally rules. And the punchiness of the raspberry and the bracing acidity of the lemon are enough to keep you alert during this apocalypse, or the next.
For more info on KCBC, please head here.
