Urban South Htx: Triple Spilled: Strawberry, Banana, Vanilla, Cheesecake (USA: Fruit Sour: 6% ABV)

Visual: Pink, cloudy strawberry milkshake look and colour. Utterly opaque. Even the head looks like loose, large bubbled milkshake head that leaves pink sediment clinging to the side of the glass.

Nose: Strawberry milkshake. Tart grapes. Vanilla toffee. Cheesecake. Banana milkshake. Creamy.

Body: Thick and creamy. Tart white grapes. Banana milkshake. Slight acidity at back of the throat. New York style cheesecake. Tart kiwi. Syrupy feel under the milkshake mouthfeel.

Finish: Strawberry milkshake. Green grapes. Banana milkshake. Cheesecake. Kiwi. Apples. Vanilla and vanilla toffee. Toffee cheesecake. Sour apple sweets. Sour cherry sweets.

Conclusion: Ok, this legitimately should not fucking work. For one thing it looks exactly like a milkshake.

I poured it, it came out looking like a milkshake, pour and all, even down to the large bubbled head that leaves sediment on the glasses’ edge. Everything looked like a milkshake.

This is a milkshake.

Or is it?

Well, let’s look at the flavours. Flavour-wise you can tell pretty much what you are going to get just by looking at the words on the can – banana (in a milkshake style), strawberry (also in a milkshake style), tons of vanilla (Oddly, not in a milkshake style, a much more pure vanilla to vanilla toffee style). There are very clear cheesecake notes (in a cheesecake style, New York cheesecake style). They aren’t lying to you at any point here, and it is stupidly creamy and edges close to painfully sweet.

Now, this is when things get weird. In the aroma there are notes of tart grapes. Not unexpected, this is a fruited sour, for all the extra ingredients and grapes aren’t unheard of in milkshakes. So unusual but not shocking. However then you start sipping things start going off the rails. Up front it is all creamy milkshake, then, nestled at the core is a syrupy feeling, slightly sour, acidic hit at the back of the throat, green fruit filled sour beer. Which sticks around long enough to confuse the hell out of you then sink back into the creaminess.

The sour side is much thicker than your usual, drier sour beer style, packed with a very syrupy feel, but still, yep there is an actual sour beer nestled away, like a bear hidden in a cave. HOW?

I mean I presume bears hide in caves. I may not have researched that one. If they don’t, then substitute a cave hiding animal.

Also, how do you have a sour milkshake and it doesn’t just like curdled milk that has gone off? HOW?

So, is it any good? Fuck knows what good even means here. I’m having a laugh, I can say that, but this possibly the least beery beer I have had for a long time. Half milkshake, half sour beer to sour liqueur, thing.

There is no way I would drink this regularly. It is too sweet for anything short of a dessert drink, too alcoholic for a milkshake replacement, not refreshing in the slightest.

And yet…

Feck it, this is such a laugh. Somehow leans heavily towards the fruit and dessert milkshake style while still having successful sour edges. Admittedly a lot of those sour edges are like sour chewy sweets, but still.

If the intrinsic idea of it doesn’t put you off, I would say sure, give it a go, have a laugh. Have an oddity of a sugar shock sweet yet sour milkshake beer. You are probably only going to ever want to try it as a one off, a bit of fun. Just don’t expect subtlety or traditional beer character and you will probably get along with it just fine.

Background: Ok, the can lists this as Strawberry, Banana, Vanilla, Cheesecake – but I have seen a few places online refers to it as Strawberry, Banana, Vanilla Cheesecake which kind of makes sense as well. I don’t know how cheesecake even comes into this. From their website Triple Spilled refers to three times as much fruit as normal, and I’m fairly sure cheesecake isn’t a fruit. At a guess they use banana, strawberry and vanilla pods to make this, to give a cheesecake like taste, but for all I know they blended up cheesecake and dumped it in. The craft beer scene does shit like that. Also unsure of the abv as I cannot see it on the can. Beer Bruvs, where I bought it, list it as 6%, the Urban South web site lists the Triple Spilled beers as between 6 and 6.5% abv, so sure something like that. Couldn’t see a canned date for this one, so cannot say how it fits in the freshness scale – but everything else in their recent batch has been fairly darn fresh. Though it did result in this can, like all the cans of this buying batch, being very excitable when opened, but not so much that I lost any before pouring. I just needed to be quick on my feet. Went with Noctule: Wretched Abyss as backing music, just because. Hey this beer makes no sense, why should my music choice?