Abita Brewing Co.
Abita Springs, LA
Available: AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NC, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, SC, TN, TX, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV
For every bottle of SOS—Save Our Shore—sold, Abita will donate 75 cents to the rescue and restoration of the environment, industry and individuals fighting to survive the Gulf oil spill.
ABV: 7
ABW: 5.6
Color: 7
Bitterness: 35
Original gravity: 1064
I love good beer for a good cause, and Save Our Shore (SOS) is beautiful both ways, with proceeds from each bottle going to the eponymous foundation set up to help out the Gulf Coast. This pilsner pours as hazy yellow as a Louisiana sunbeam with a TV-perfect head of white foam to cap it off. Aromas of lemons and grass (noble hops for a noble cause) mingle with a wheat-like breadiness that is similarly followed in the flavor and topped by a crisp, clean, slightly peppery finish. You don’t want to just drink SOS because it does good, you want to drink it because it tastes good.
A ‘weizen pils.’ That’s what I love about today’s brewing world: the tearing up of rulebooks and the stretching of boundaries. So here we have the spicy, fruity complexity of a weizen married to the crisp hop bite of a pils. The result is a tasty, easy-drinking beer, floral and hay-like in places, with soft, juicy tropical and citrus fruit flavors, offset by the sappy, bitter tang of hop resins. There’s plenty to entertain the palate, with the hops really taking over in the dry finish, leaving herbal rather than citrus notes. An interesting beer for a great cause.
Lisa Morrison, aka The Beer Goddess, writes about beer whenever she can and also gets to talk about it on a weekly radio show in her hometown of Portland, OR.
Author of the Good Bottled Beer Guide and The Book of Beer Knowledge, Jeff Evans is an eight-time editor of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide and one of Britain's best-known beer writers.
