Name: The Sixth Element
Brand: Martin House Brewing Company
Availability: InStock

Name a beer The Sixth Element and the reference makes itself. Martin House Brewing Company has leaned into it on the can, where a figure wrapped in strapped white stands against a pink sky with small craft threading between distant towers.

Inside is a sour ale at 10 percent with four fruits in it. The Fort Worth brewery gives the bill as blood orange, passion fruit, dragon fruit and lime, and lists the beer among five new releases this week.

Those four are not doing equal work. Blood orange and passion fruit are the loud ones, either capable of carrying a beer alone. Lime is the sharpener, and in something already acidic that is a decision to push further rather than round anything off. Dragon fruit is the outlier. It is mild to the point of being faint, and its main contribution in most applications is color, a deep magenta that goes a long way toward making the pour resemble the artwork.

Then there is the strength. Sours are normally built light. Alcohol and acidity are both hard on yeast, so getting a sour to 10 percent means keeping fermentation moving in conditions that discourage it. Doing that while the fruit stays legible is the harder half of this recipe, and it places The Sixth Element nearer the brewery's barrel-aged end of the range than a summer sour.

It is out this week in cans. Martin House points drinkers to its own beer finder for retail locations, and the Fort Worth taproom is open daily from noon.

Editor’s Take

Dragon fruit has one of the great careers in modern brewing. It tastes, if we are being generous, like a kiwi that has been talked out of it. What it does have is that impossible magenta, and an entire industry has quietly agreed to hire it as a lighting technician rather than an actor. Nobody says this out loud. It simply keeps getting cast, over and over, in beers where somebody wanted the glass to match the can.

And honestly, good. There is nothing wrong with a beer being beautiful on purpose. Blood orange and passion fruit will handle the talking here, lime will keep the whole arrangement from going soft, and dragon fruit will stand at the back looking spectacular. That is four fruits with four separate jobs, which is rather more thought than the phrase 'sour with four fruits' usually implies. At 10 percent it should be a slow one. Pour it somewhere with good light.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

The Sixth Element Stacks Four Fruits, One of Them for Color

Martin House stacks blood orange, passion fruit, dragon fruit and lime into a 10 percent sour. Three of the four bring flavor. The fourth is mostly there to make the pour match the can.

Source & Editorial