Instant Vacation Is Full of Strawberries and Pours Pale Gold

Strawberries usually announce themselves in a beer's color. Instant Vacation, out now from Fieldwork Brewing Company, does not follow that rule: the Berkeley brewery describes a golden-straw pour, the sort you would expect from a pilsner. The fruit only shows up once you drink it.

The beer is a tropical sour ale at 8 percent ABV, made with strawberries, limes, and coconut. Fieldwork sets out the flavors in sequence - ripe strawberry first, then a wave of lime acidity cutting through the sweetness, then toasted coconut arriving late to round off the edges. The brewery's own shorthand for the combination is a Lava Flow, the resort-bar drink that pours a strawberry daiquiri into a pina colada.

Coconut is the ingredient doing the unusual work here. It turns up constantly in stouts and dessert-styled beers, where its fat and creaminess have roast and sweetness to lean against. In anything acidic it is far rarer. In a sour it acts as a counterweight instead: that same soft, slightly waxy character blunts the edge of the lime rather than sharpening it. That is a good argument for placing it at the end of the beer rather than the front. Eight percent is also toward the upper end for a fruited sour, and gives the beer enough body to carry all three additions without any one of them thinning out.

Anyone building a plate around it could do worse than something salty and charred - grilled shrimp, or chips and lime. Either would push back against the fruit rather than agree with it.

Instant Vacation is pouring now across Fieldwork's Bay Area taprooms and is available in 16oz four-packs for pickup or delivery, listed at $24 through the brewery's shop. Shipping is limited to California.