I haven’t reviewed many 4 Pines beers on here yet, but they are one of the more prolific microbreweries around putting out consistently good quality ales. If you feel the need, they have a bar in Manly with most of their standard beers on tap and a revolving line up of specialty ales.
Sunday roast is one of their specialty beers – designed for the ‘beer mimics food’ showcase of the Sydney Craft Beer Week 2012. As the name suggests, it is a golden ale that has been carefully crafted to invoke the essence of a Sunday roast dinner, with sweet potato, cumin, rosemary, fennel seed, and lemon peel.
It is 4.2% and sadly, only around for Craft Beer week 2012.
The Verdict
If you are unable to try it yourself, you probably won’t believe me when I say this is exactly like a roast dinner, only…beery. You stare at the glass thinking mmmmm beer, but when you sip it becomes mmmmm roast sweet potato. Naturally, I would have thought this would make for a rather unpleasant drink, but it just works.
The pale gold liquid has a full body feel with a low aroma of spice. The sip is sweet potato carrying a little spice, slight herbal notes, and ending on malts. Hop flavours are minimal to non-existent.
It’s tasty and very refreshing.
Score: 8.5/10
Drink if you like…
Be adventurous! Give it a try regardless of your tastes. There really isn’t any hop bitterness present, the one thing that seems to divide beer drinkers, so it shouldn’t be offensive even on the most timid of palates.
Trivia
As you can imagine, adding sweet potato to a beer is not as simple as throwing in a bunch of chopped tubers to your wort. Potatoes have starches which can be converted to alcohol by yeast (vodka anyone?) but getting the flavour out of them is a little harder. There are many methods for employing them in home brewing, but the most successful appears to be to roast the sweet potatoes first until they caramelise a little, and then stir the flesh into the water that you plan to mash with until it becomes a potato slurry. You can then mash out as per normal using this liquid. Quite often spices will be utilised to enhance the final flavours of the potato.
A Quick Pint 