I geeked out a little bit when I saw this on the tap lists at some of the Big Woods restaurants in the area, because you don’t find huckleberry-flavored…well, anything, really…in this part of the world very often. Amy and I went to Bloomington this weekend for her birthday, to see Carrie Newcomer in concert at the Buskirk-Chumley theatre; and I got a chance to try this beer when we had a late dinner at the Bloomington Big Woods after we got in on Friday night. The server asked me if I had had it before, and when I said no, she said that people had been about 60-40 on it, which I took to mean more of them didn’t like the beer than liked it. I was sort of hoping for something purplish in color, even though the word “flavoring” in the description told me that they weren’t using real huckleberries; but in reality, it’s exactly the sort of straw yellow color you would expect of a blonde ale. The huckleberry flavoring is very powerful on the nose and tongue, and I can definitely understand how it might be off-putting for some. The flavor fades to the familiar Six Foot Blonde base on the back end, but up front this is the most strongly-flavored of any of the Six Foot Blonde variants I have tried. It’s not remotely as good as the huckleberry lager I tried in Montana (from the now-sadly-departed Great Northern Brewing Company in Whitefish, MT), but it’s also not the candy-ish circus sideshow that it could have been.
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