Summer Beer Tour - Otter Summer/Dogfish Festina Peach

Its that time of the year, summer. It is my plan to spend my next 2 months off sampling a wide array of different beers. No better place to start than the seasonal brews that start pour out of breweries this time of year. Here I will discuss a couple Otter Creek Brewery's Otter Summer Ale and Dogfish Head Brewery's Festina Peach.

Otter Creek Summer Ale

Otter Creek Brewery, located in Middlebury VT, is in my opinion one of the more underrated breweries in the northeast. Known for their high quality small batch brew, I jumped at the chance to try there summer offering. Typical for summer beers, the Summer Ale, features a citrusy taste that melds well with the light wheat beer. It is definitely a light beer and taster better when served with a lemon wedge and pair with a meal (a nice pan seared tilapia, for example) than not. While not spectacular, the Otter Creek Summer Ale is a solid alternative to your typical beer of choice when the weather starts to warm. I think it would be a great pick to bring to a summer barbecue or a day at the beach.

Rating: 5.5 out of 10 possible Otters

Dogfish Head Festina Peche

The first time I tried this beer was on the beach at DogFish Heads brew pub in Delaware. Its was a refreshing beverage that was a nice alternative to the barbecue wings I was eating. When I saw it in the beer section at Wegmans I knew I needed that four pack. The Festina Peche is a BerlinerWeisse style beer. This style was developed in Berlin (go figure) and was noted for its tartness and sourness. It was really the original summer beer. Sadly not too many breweries create this style. Dogfish takes the original and updates it by fermenting the beer with peaches. The result is a light beer that is both tart and sweet - the peach flavor definitely works to cut down the tartness factor. The Festina Peche is a summer beer done right and I would be hard pressed to find a summer styled beer that is any better.

7 out of 10 Peaches