ABV: 4.2%

What a year 2016 has been! Cincinnati has welcomed multiple new breweries all throughout the Queen City. While I haven’t been able to make it to them all, I have stopped in at Streetside Brewery in Columbia Tusculum quite a few times. The brewery opened in October of 2016 right in the heart of Columbia Tusculum where the former East End Cafe was located. The owners are Brian and Kathie Hickey along with their son, Garrett Hickey. The former Hickey has previously worked at Rivertown Brewery in Cincinnati and learned his brewing skills at Brewlab in England. He has had years of volunteering at other breweries such as Madtree Brewing with their packaging and Listermann Brewing with their labeling. The brewery has a laid back atmosphere with a 2000 square foot taproom with indoor and outdoor seating with garage doors that open to the outside. It’s a neighborhood brewery with a family and friend based staff that makes you feel right at home. They operate on a 15-barrel system and brew experimental small batches to take on new styles for the Cincinnati area.

Streetside has only distributed a few kegs around the city with plans of only distributing around 20-30 kegs in order to keep most of their brews available only in the taproom. While as of right now they do not plan on bottling and canning Raspberry Beret, they do plan on canning in the near future and are currently waiting to submit their labels to get approved. The first beer that they plan on canning is their “Suh Brah” New England style IPA. They are currently working on improving the style and get the haziness down before canning.

While I could go on and on about the brewery itself, it’s time to talk about the delicious brew, Raspberry Beret. Raspberry Beret is a kettle sour with a lactobacillus blend, pilsner and white wheat malt, hops and raspberry puree. It was one of the first batches brewed at Streetside and was originally a homebrew recipe of the lead brewer, Luke Shropshire. Luke previously brewed at Mt. Carmel Brewing Company.

Raspberry Beret won awards even before the brewery had it’s grand opening. Raspberry Beret won first in sours and first overall in the King of Ohio beer competition. This competition included judges who were beer bloggers and writers in Columbus, Ohio to choose which beers they thought were the best session beer made in Ohio. There were over 60 session beers in four categories: sours, session IPAs, lagers, and ales all being under 5% ABV. While the pink color of the beer already makes it stand out, the aroma of raspberries and tartness of the Berliner style shine together making this beautiful beer that can appeal to sour beer fans and even wine and cider drinkers.

While Raspberry Beret is a high demand beer in the taproom, the brewery wants to focus on experimenting with new recipes and focus on the small batch method. Streetside keeps things interesting as they keep brewing new beers and even decide on the hops the day of brewing. According to Hickey he said it keeps things interesting to not just follow the same recipe every brew and gives them a chance to experiment with new and different variations of styles.

Streetside tapped their last keg of Raspberry Beret on New Year’s Day for their Kegs n Eggs event. The keg only lasted about an hour after the brewery opened. While this is the last keg of the original batch, this isn’t goodbye to Raspberry Beret. We will see Raspberry Beret again in the near future. He says that they plan to have it around from March to October.

If you missed out on Raspberry Beret the first time around, do yourself a favor and make sure you keep an eye out for the next batch in the spring.

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