Hell or High Watermelon Wheat Beer:
Welcome, welcome one and all to another day of beer reviews and another different beer that comes out of left field.  First off, this beer comes from a brewery that deserves my award for best brewery name: 21st Amendment Brewery. How awesome is that?  A brewery named after one of the measures to get us out of the depression (and to some, the 18th amendment helped us get into the depression, but that’s another topic for another time).  21st makes some very unique sounding beers with cleaver names like Back in Black, Allies Win The War, Bitter American, and Fireside Chat all are twisted takes on classic brews.  Today’s brew is their take on the wheat beer, Hell or High Watermelon.  The beer is brewed with real watermelons in the secondary fermentation phase (long explanation short: secondary fermentation is moving the brewed beer from the original vessel to another to let the still living yeast do their thing, again) giving it a unique and surprising flavor.  The beer itself pours well, giving a foggy gold color with a decent sized head that last for about half of the consumption.  The nose is wheat with a undertone of fresh watermelon and that leads us straight into the most important issue: taste.  The taste was wholly unexpected to me: this isn’t a sweet beer.  Not even close, tasting more like an over ripe watermelon washed down with a good double filtered wheat beer than anything else.   If you’ve every had watermelon juice, it’s much like that on the after taste, I noticed a watermelon flavor with every breath I exhaled during the glass emptying process.  A great beer, it’s a damn shame that it can’t be found here.  In fact, the closest place you can find this brewery’s beer is at DFW airport on Virgin Airlines.  On their flights, Virgin serves Brew Free of Die! IPA which includes the Richard Branson ice cubes on request.  The brewery is located in San Francisco and distributes to the Pacific coast , most of the Mid -Atlantic states and other states in the North but not us.  Hell, Alaska gets their beer but not us.  Sad.  Alas I have a few cans left over from my importing them from Delaware and they’ll be valued through the summer that’s for sure.