Mill Street Cassis is part of the brewery’s 2016 Summer Sampler, which has arrived a bit early, but given the weather around here lately, I don’t see anyone complaining!

This 355ml bottle pours a murky, dark salmon amber colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, rocky, and fizzy pale pink head, which leaves some stellar dissipating cloud cover lace around the glass as it slowly sinks away.

It smells of gritty wheat malt, a further crackery graininess, some muddled dark berry fruit (kind of like ripe cherries mixed with black currants), estery Belgian yeast, and very wan earthy, herbal, and leafy hop bitters. The taste is bready and doughy pale and wheat malt, a somewhat sugary black fruitiness (again, sort of mixed, with some bloated raisins getting into bed with the currants), a more laid-back yeastiness than in the nose, some weak licorice/vanilla earthiness, and a still hard to really even notice leafy, weedy, and floral hoppiness. The carbonation is obviously quite active in its clear and present frothiness, the body a so-so medium weight, and mostly smooth, perhaps a touch of that sneaky yeast raining on the potential parade route here. It finishes off-dry, the fruitiness starting to catch a groove, and a very mild tartness coming on-line.

Overall, Mill Street Cassis is a fairly pleasant and easy to drink fruit beer, the guest berries not overwhelming the base Belgian-tinted wheat ale, I’m guessing. An offering for when you don’t want tart, and you don’t want sweet, but something more or less in-between.