Drygate Brewing Co Tone Burst Rhubarb Berliner Weisse Beer Review

It's not every day you find a rhubarb wheat beer on the shelves at LIDL so I thought I'd better grab one and see what it had to offer, you wouldn't expect anything less from me would you? I'm a huge lover of wheat beers, especially on a sunny day, and today is as sunny as they get in the UK so it felt like the right time to get this one out of the fridge. Also as it was a work day I thought best to stick to something soft, and at 3.2% this is about as soft as a beer gets these days.

I think this is the first Drygate beer I've had. Anyway they are a relatively new Glaswegian brewery who have been cooking up craft beers since 2014, they seem to have a decent selection covering all the major beer categories and the Tone Burst Rhubarb Berliner Weisse looks like about their weirdest. So onto the actual beer... It comes in a colourful 440ml can so it's a decent size. It pours almost like a homemade lemonade with very little head and lots of fizz. It's a cloudy yellow almost peach colour so it certainly doesn't have a rhubarb look to it. 

The smell is pretty strong, but that's normal for such a lively beer. What really matters though is the taste, and this could have been called flavour burst instead of Tone Burst Rhubarb Berliner Weisse. It certainly has a strong zest to it, and it's far more sour than I expected, so if you like sour beers this may be right up your street. Personally I'm not a huge fan of sours, but each to their own, and I try not to let my own views affect the scores too much in my reviews. The real problem with this beer is it's just so lively you aren't sure if you're drinking a wheat beer, a sour or a very fruity lager. The other problem is that for the life of me I couldn't taste any rhubarb, it tasted more like sour lemons, so the name is a little confusing.

I don't mind a beer not really fitting into a defined category but I don't really know what this is trying to achieve. At a lowly 3.2% you may think it's a good session beer, that you'll be able to have a few in the evening, and wake up fine the next day, but the taste is far too strong and sour for that. This isn't a beer that you could have a session on, so is it a sunny day beer? Well not really, on a sunny day you want something light and fun, not something that has this much taste. So maybe I've just done it right, maybe it's the have one every now and again when you have work the next day and just fancy something different. That kinda works. Despite everything it's really not a bad beer it's just not to my taste, if you enjoy a sour lemon taste you'll probably enjoy it, if you're hoping for a proper Berliner Weisse beer your really wont. I'm going to give Tone Burst Rhubarb Berliner Weisse from Drygate Brewing Co 5.5 out of 10.