Funk Factory has a catalogue of beers that are narrow in scope, but harrowing in depth, like the confines of a congressional investigation. You won’t see banana porters, or even gentle english milds; what you will see is every swatch of acidic wild ales possible. Now if you sat in the Home Depot paint aisle for an appreciable amount of time, you would be able to distinguish the nuances between “apple core” and “arctic linen” whereas some bluntsighted interlocutor would just call them all WHITE or ipso facto SOUR. What happens when them swatches are painted and repainted in a second use? Here we have a “second runnings” beer of sorts, not in the petite sense, but in the provincial produce sense. Funk Factory made Framzwart and then racked this beer to those insane 4lbs of blackberries per gallon TRASH BARRELS. One man’s spent trashberries are another man’s smoothie. I was expecting a pale rose glow like Grim Harvest from Jester King, but boy was I fucking wrong. That is an insane amount of fruit and I beat up on Black Project for using that much fruit in the past. It’s sheer excess from a Jamba Juice perspective. As a result, you would expect the handmedown version to be tamer but think again, this is a bucking acidic bronco and you gotta grip those tannins for a full 8 seconds. It is intensely drying like a full bodied Lirac/Gigondas, long deep syrah meets vaporized smuckers. The juice is long gone and all that remains is the violet husks of these etheral fruit skins to walk the staves seeking solace. It is puckering but has an immense farmhouse complexity underneath to counter balance the nearly punishing gum defacement within the musky comte cheese swallow. The swallow lingers like your mother in law on a Holiday weekend. The flavor to abv ratio on this is dizzying but I don’t know if someone could tank this entire beer solo. I will say that the acidity is far more manageable north of 55 degrees and it transmutes into a kind of arid berry mars rover mission for your tastebuds. I enjoyed it, but couldn’t finish it. That “Tree of Life” seal of approval.

Also Malt Couture batch 4 is live now on iTunes, stitcher, Spotify, Google play: everywhere basically stop complaining