I was having a bit of trouble picking my beer of the month for February. Saggy Stone’s new Farmhouse Saison is very tasty. Woodstock’s Beetroot White Chocolate Stout, launched especially for #SANBeerDay, was innovative and exciting – and good! And Aegir Project’s Little Hop of Horrors is back, providing me with a decadent nightcap of an evening, paired with a pile of mature cheddar. But when I was thinking about having a beer yesterday and I looked in the fridge, I decided it wasn’t the right moment to open my last bottle of Soul Barrel’s limited release Grapefruit Fresh Nectar. The sun had gone down (I like drinking in the sun) and I’d eaten too much, so I knew while I’d still quite enjoy a beer it wouldn’t be the perfect drinking experience, and I wanted this to be special. That’s when I knew without question that this was my beer of the month.

It is perhaps no great secret that I’m not the biggest fan of the haze craze. I have no issue with hazy beer – it’s the characteristics that go with hazy pales that bother me. I rather like my pale ales, and especially IPAs, to be bitter and I too often find that NEPAs and NEIPAs are not. At least not enough for me. Soul Barrel’s Fresh Nectar (5.2% ABV) is a New England Pale Ale, as cloudy as a weiss and almost as juicy as freshly pulverised mangoes.

Actually, that’s a silly thing to say, for there is no mango here. It’s grapefruit through and through. I love grapefruit in a beer. Along with raspberry it’s my favourite beer fruit. If you’re not a fan of grapefruit let me save you some trouble (and money) – you are not going to like this beer. Get the straight up Fresh Nectar instead.

Still with me? Welcome, fellow grapefruit-in-beer fan! So there’s a reason that this beer is like chomping on a fresh grapefruit. Through every step of the process, measures have been taken to inject maximum grapefruitiness to this pale ale. There was rind added to the hopback (kind of like a giant strainer, usually full of hops, which a brewer passes beer through en route to the fermenter to get maximum hop flavour and aroma – or in this case grapefruit flavour and aroma). There was also fresh grapefruit juice in the mix (sorry, forgot to ask where in the process – hopefully Nick Smith, Soul Barrel’s owner, will read this and share further insight in the comments). And then the beer was dry hopped with grapefruit. Or, y’know, dry grapefruited.

But that’s not all! If you think the initial aroma is similar to that of Devil’s Peak’s Grapefruit King’s Blockhouse, that’s because Soul Barrel’s Grapefruit Fresh Nectar, in addition to all the above grapefruit-related techniques, also uses the same grapefruit essence. And just to top it all off, the hops chosen for this brew (Amarillo and Citra among others) were chosen for their abilities to imitate, yes – you guessed it: a grapefruit.

I’m not going to write lenghty tasting notes here. I think you have probably worked out by now that the beer tastes like grapefruit. And also beer. There are other tropical fruits there too. It’s basically breakfast punch in beer form. And if you need more convincing than that, well I don’t know how to do it.

Thanks to all the grapefruit, there is no lack of bitterness in this particular NEPA, which makes me happy. And now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to retreat to my favourite chair, which is placed exactly where the final rays of the afternoon sun fall in my garden, and I am going to sip the last half of my last bottle of Soul Barrel’s Grapefruit Fresh Nectar. And then tomorrow I’m going to drive out to Simondium to buy some more before you get it all.

Fun fact: This article features the word “grapefruit” or a derivative of it a grand total of 20 times! Well, 21 now with this insightful footnote.