Craft Brewers Are Crushing It With Grape Beer-Wine Hybrids

Hey everyone, Tony Rehagen here, your suds sommelier in our now-weekly meeting of the Top Shelf Society. Last Thursday, my co-expert Kara had us over to Italy (and Ghana!) for some killer cocktails, but this week it’s all about beer … wine. Yes, beer-wine. What?

Let me back up: Since the dawn of the craft beer, brewers have used fruit to sweeten (or sour) the deal for curious drinkers. In fact, in the beer world, “fruiting” is a verb for adding puree, juice or whole fruit to pretty much any style of beer. Whether it’s a lime-tinged lager, a basic brewpub blueberry wheat, a chocolate-cherry stout or the broader flood of tangy, fruit-based American wild ales, every variety of sun-ripened fermentable has been squeezed in pursuit of the new or novel.