Vitamin Sea Brewing’s Perception Is Still Spoonfed, Sour Ale, 6% ABV

Appearance: What a beauty. Raspberries give it a lovely light pinkness. Opaque. Vanishing head.

Aroma: With this beer, the aroma is what you’ll write home about. Wowie. Graham cracker, brown sugar, raspberry, lime. Definitely lactose in here.

Taste: Very mild sour. Tart fruit & citrus but mellowed out.

Mouthfeel: Oddly coating (that lactose at work) and carbonated at the same time, in a quite good way. Surprisingly zippy on the tongue, given how quickly the head vanished.

I thought that I’d find a raspberry key lime sour gimicky and busy, but I like this one. (It takes me back to my Michigan days and Short’s Key Lime Pie.) I’d prefer it in a 10-ounce pour, rather than a pint (that lactose gets a bit cloying by the end), but I like it.

Last year’s advent beer box introduced me to Vitamin Sea (Weymouth, MA) with their Seven Bells and All’s Well, a vanilla, cacao, coffee milk stout that I cracked while snowed in in West Virginia. That beer was so perfect for the setting that I couldn’t really trust myself to be objective. That beer had a lot going on, too, but I could definitely handle a full pint of it.

I can’t find anything online about the name “Perception Is Still Spoonfed.” The “e”s on the can art suggest a reference to The Matrix, maybe? Ideas?