Boston Beer Company - Verloren

Say what you want about Sam Adams, but they try a lot of cool styles. When I was in Boston earlier this year, I got to try Sam Adams' 26.2, a gose style beer brewed specially for the Boston Marathon. While this beer was exclusive to Boston, it must have elicited a pretty positive response because they recently brewed another gose, Verloren, which did get national distribution. Never heard of a gose? Neither had I until about a year ago. Basically, a gose is a light unfiltered wheat beer, with a lot of similarities to a wit beer. The major difference is that the gose style uses salt in the brewing process, giving a very different quality to the brew. I've tried a few goses now and am slowly falling in love with the style. Let's see how this one turned out.

Verloren pours a hazy copper color with a thin but insanely creamy tan head that lasts forever. The smell was largely wet hay and coriander with some noticeable orange rind in the background. I also got some faint wheat smells and a touch of salt. I'm far from being a gose expert, but this one smelled pretty on the mark.

The taste is largely grainy and toasty with a good amount of coriander and a touch of some indistinct spices. Biscuity malt undertones carried the flavor until they subsided in a thick and bready finish. To me, even at 6%, this beer felt way too heavy. A gose is supposed to be light, crisp and drinkable, but this one just didn't have it. A bit of a chewy mouthfeel caused the lighter flavors (and any hint of salt) to get completely washed out. What was left behind wasn't bad, but it was a shadow of what a good gose can be.

Final Grade: C

Top 100 Beers Tasted: 39