"RiversideBrewing" news and stories

Photo: Joshua M. Bernstein

Joshua M. Bernstein, Gourmet.com's beer columnist, has written about brews, bars and booze for New York Magazine, Time Out New York, ForbesTraveler.com and The New York Times.

Too often, fruit-based beers are cloyingly sweet abominations, the beer world's equivalent of Bartles & James wine coolers. The fruits -- be they blueberries or apricots -- whip the malts into meek submission, creating little more than watery, carbonated beer smoothies.

So how do you tastefully infuse a beer with a fruit's delicious flavors? Dan Kahn had a serendipitous solution. Back in the 1990s, Kahn toiled at Riverside Brewing in Riverside, Calif., a SoCal city famous for its orange groves.

In honor of Riverside's Orange Blossom Festival, the town official contacted asked Kahn to brew a special beer. He plucked a few fistfuls of aromatic blossoms (an ingredient common to desserts and Middle-Eastern cuisine), then steeped them like tea and incorporated the concoction into a brew batch: "It wasn't like a fruit beer, where the fruit clashes with hops," Kahn says. "It added an extra characteristic that other beers just don't have."