BEWARE: A TREFE BEER!

Blue Moon’s New ‘Ale’ Is Half Wine
By Venessa Wong on December 20, 2012

Just the idea of a beer-wine hybrid raises so many questions. OK, really, just one: Is that as disgusting as it sounds?

Armed with two bottles of Blue Moon’s new Vintage Ale beer-wine hybrid—coming soon to stores in all 50 states—two of my colleagues and I sat down for a taste test. The red version is called Impulse. It looks like cranberry spritzer. It smells like beer, with a hint of wine. Or wine, with beery notes.

Either way, eventually you’ll get drunk. At 51 percent beer, 49 percent wine, the new products are 8.5 percent alcohol by volume—more than the average beer, but less than wine. The genius behind them is Keith Villa, the founder of Blue Moon Brewing, now part of the SABMiller empire, who has been working on these alcoholic “ligers” for 17 years, he says. But the alcohol market circa 1995 was still in the middle of a Zima bender, and Villa shelved his idea until 2006. Since then, some of his beer-wine experiments (the Chardonnay Blonde and Vintage Blonde Ale) have won medals at the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Cup—though, it’s worth noting, they were not this year’s batch of Impulse or the white version, called, mysteriously, Proximity.

One thousand barrels of Impulse and 1,000 barrels of Proximity—about 313,000 bottles total—will be offered at specialty craft beer stores and restaurants nationwide for about $10 per bottle. The target consumer: adventurous wine drinkers.