Cigar City Brewing Strawberry Shortcake

Cigar City Brewing Strawberry Shortcake is a Munich Helles Lager with no ABV listed on the bottle. Bottle date 01/16/16, opened on 04/22/16. I paused before grabbing this bottle locally, usually if a CCB 22oz bottle appears in Georgia it’s because it didn’t sell in Florida, but this one was actually pretty fresh! Hopefully a sign of things to come.

This beer pours with a crystal clear golden color that is simply perfect, the white head faded rather quickly to nearly nothing. I am going to hand it to CCB, this smells 100% like strawberry shortcake. Not sure how they did it, but I would swear I had my nose in a bowl of angle food cake, fresh strawberries and fluffy whipped cream! The taste, however, loses all of the charm of the aroma. It starts a bit sweet and malty for a split second which I could easily attribute to the cake portion of the assumed flavor profile. Unfortunately the strawberry is coming off in a tart and medicinal way that dominates most of the taste. I would go as far as to call it the fake strawberry flavor you remember from children’s cough syrup. The saving grace here is the fact the the aftertaste does somehow reveal a lingering fresh berry flavor that is really nice.

So this is clearly not my favorite offering from Cigar City, but I will say that aroma alone made this worth the dollars I spent on it. Seriously, this smells so good you guys.