Australian Mountain Pepper Berry Lager
Style: Spiced/Herbed Lager
ABV: 5%
Presentation: 6 packs of 341 ml brown bottles
Brewery: Amber’s Brewing Co.
Country: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
KANPAI! w/ Jeff Werstiuk
It really doesn’t get more unique for locally crafted beers than Amber’s Australian Mountain Pepper Berry Lager. Okay, except for maybe their alchemically transmogrified Sap Vampire Maple Lager. Just goes to show how closely they are sticking to their mission statement of straying off the beaten path and remaining as far outside of the box as they can get away with. Seriously, it’s difficult to produce a decent lager on its own, let alone one with a unique slant or modification, there is no way on earth to hide any flaws or unwanted quirks with a lager, it’s all there laid bare, exposed and open to the world for better or worse. There are predetermined expectations for a lager as well: it needs to be crisp, clean and refreshing. Add an extra twist to this with a curious foreign ingredient, and you still need to be able to step up to the plate and deliver. Amber’s pulls this off with their Australian Mountain Pepper Berry Lager, what I like to consider as the flagship offering of their brewery, one of the first to be produced since their inception, and one that has been honed and fine-tuned until now, finally just right.
The Australian Mountain Pepper Berry is in itself a bit of a curiosity. Originally known as the Tasmanian pepperberry on its home soil, it tends to grow on a shrub but can reach 4-5 metres as a tree, found in Tasmania and the Southeastern regions of Australia in New South Wales and Victoria, mostly in cool high altitude regions. Previously used by the local Aborigines for medicinal purposes, it’s presently utilized as a culinary spice, although the Australian Mountain Pepper Berry is also purported to be the world’s strongest known antioxidant. What appears to simply be a sundried blueberry tends to get ground up and used as a garnish or spiced ingredient in many food dishes, even the plant’s leaves are aromatic and spicy, similar to a chilli.
While serving this flavoured lager chilled will accentuate the crisp and clean characteristics of it, allowing it to warm a bit allows the aromatics an opportunity to be released, and the fruit and spice highlights to become more noticeable within the flavour. There’s really no one glass ideal to serve this in, almost anything will do, although a pint or sleeve glass seems the most common choice. You’ll be greeted by a slightly chill-hazed deep golden appearance as you pour it into your choice of glassware, with a short tight creamy white head that will linger for awhile. There will also be a welcoming bready maltiness from the aroma, accompanied by faint fruity and flowery notes, and an equally mild spicy herbal contrast. In the mouth it feels fuller than your average lager, smooth yet balanced with a pleasant carbonation. Then a sweet bready malt up front in the flavour, a dry fruity sweetness following this until it is joined by a savoury zip of white pepper and floral hops on the finish, very quenching as a whole.
Due to the unique nature of the Australian Mountain Pepper Berry Lager, definite food pairings get a little bit tricky. One thing’s for sure, it’ll help balance out salty appetizers and snacks with its dry, quenching nature, a casual savoury volley within your mouth. This lager would also help accentuate mildly spicy dishes, and will most certainly hold its own with almost any cheese platter you’d care to work your way through alongside a few bottles of this stuff, even the astringent cheeses. You see, cheese coats your tongue and your taste receptors, and by doing so numbs a lot of the flavours from the traditional red wine and cheese pairings. Because of the dry crispness and carbonation from the Australian Mountain Pepper Berry Lager, it will scrub your palate while releasing its own distinct flavours to accompany and potentially contrast almost anything a particular cheese has to offer. Experimenting has never become so fun and satisfying, give it a shot.
The next steps in the cooler:
From This Brewery:
Sap Vampire
Pale Ale
Bub’s Lunch Pail Ale
Kenmount Road Chocolate Stout
Other Unique Beers:
Midas Touch - Dogfish Head
Chipotle Ale - Rogue
Juniper Pale Ale - Rogue
Van Helsing’s All Natural Mouthwash - Sherbrooke/Alley Kat
Pi Jiu - Sherbrooke/Alley Kat
Lateral Steps:
Samuel Adams Boston Lager
Fullers ESB
Erdinger Weissebier
Hoegaarden Original Witbier
Edelweiss Snowfresh
For The Adventurous:
Little Scrapper IPA - Half Pints
Aventinus Weizenbock
Traquair Jacobite