The Exotic Beer Weekly - This week Well's Banana Bread Beer

A Well Bread Beer.

 

Some things just go together. You know what I mean. Meat pie and sauce. Curry and rice. Michael Bay and explosions. You can’t have one without the other. Other things, however, you wouldn’t expect to work well together. Take, just for example, banana and beer. Or even better, take instead banana bread and beer. If someone even tried to use the words “banana bread” and “beer” in the same sentence, I might have called them mad. But (somewhat thankfully) someone, somewhere, sometime, woke up one morning and thought “Hmmm, I really like banana bread, and I really like beer. I should mix them together. I shall call it Banana Bread Beer!” 

 

And what this man created is something to be marvelled at. He took two things as different as chalk and cheese and blended them together masterfully (I’m presuming it was a man; it may have been a woman. My point still stands). As soon as you pop off the lid, the rich aroma of bananas wafts delicately around the room, which for me immediately conjured up memories of those banana lollies from when I was a kid. I spent a good few minutes just basking in the smell. The label talks about banoffee (banana and toffee) aromas, which I kind of get, but only because I read it. 

 

I was a little worried the banana bread flavour might be too overpowering, but my fears were put to rest with the first sip. It’s apparently an ale but you could never tell; it’s a light, fresh beer, with a strong banana taste that somehow manages to not overwhelm the senses, and just a hint of bread in the aftertaste. It’s exceptionally smooth and sweet, and hardly bitter, so much so that it’s easy to forget it is in fact beer. 

 

Which brings me to its only drawback. This beer is very easy to drink. Too easy. I polished off an entire bottle in about 10 (ten) minutes. Which is fine normally, but this bottle is 500mL and 5.2% alcohol. Again, this is fantastic if your intention is to get blind rotten drunk. But not fine if you want to sip, and enjoy, this wonderful drink, which you should. It’s not a beer you drink to get drunk. You drink it to revel in an odd concoction that achieves what so many others have failed at. I admit it’s probably not for everyone, but this beer is definitely worth trying at least once. Just be prepared to remortgage the house for it; like bananas after a hurricane, it’s incredibly expensive [we don't mean to trivialise natural disasters, it's just a turn of phrase – ed.].

I found it at about $6 per bottle. So if you can find it, and afford it, definitely worth a look. Oh yeah, and they use fair trade bananas, so it's heaps good for like, the indigenous peoples, and, you know, the world and whatever. 

 

I award Well’s Banana Bread Beer 4 slices out of 5.