Agave Wheat

Wamp’s Wisdom

Agave Wheat from Breckenridge Brewery in Colorado pours a hazy golden with a tiny white head.

On the nose, bread and grass contend for consideration. After an initial bready, malty blast of flavor, a mild bitterness, which must be the agave, rounds out the flavor. For an unfiltered beer, there is virtually no cloudiness.

Other than the faint bitterness, the agave was mercifully not very prominent. As regular readers will already know, I’m no fan of wheat beers. Couple that with the brewery’s other offering — Vanilla Porter, a beer so sickly sweet it could be used as pancake syrup — and then you throw in agave, which only has one appropriate use: making tequila.

Even after all that, this beer didn’t suck as bad as I was prepared for. So for that, thanks Breckenridge Brewery.

Rico’s Reaction
It’s a bad sign when a beer slams you with an overwhelming sour scent the moment you pop the top. It was like someone had cut open a bunch of spoiled grapes. It bore just a passing resemblance to the smell of tequila in kind of the same way that burning rubber in the distance might resemble the scent of a cup of coffee for a nanosecond.

Of course, I also took Breckenridge Brewery as a bad sign. As Wamp mentioned, their experiment with Vanilla Porter is an abomination, a sugar-coated excrement that’s as welcome on the tongue as the Visigoths were welcome in Rome.

Fortunately, the taste wasn’t as bad as the smell. Agave Wheat did taste like a wheat beer with overtones of a grapelike or raspberry flavor, though nothing as overt — or delicious — as Abita’s Purple Haze. It left a lingering citrusy sour on the tongue that wasn’t completely unpleasant.

So, in the end, Agave Wheat was different, but not different enough that I’d order it again. It wasn’t as unique an experience as I’d hoped and luckily not as bad an experience as I’d feared.