O'Fallon's Cherry Chocolate Beer

Today I will taking a look at O’Fallon’s Cherry Chocolate Beer. I picked this up simply because the label appealed to me. For some reason the label made me think about my childhood and those sodas we would get at the holidays. I guess you could call it an impulse buy.

When doing a fruit, vegetable/spice, wood aged, or specialty beer you always need to know the base style. Seeing as this is a fruit beer, I went looking for what the brewery says is the base style. For O’Fallons, all I could find is that they say it’s a dark wheat beer, so I am assuming the base is going to be a Dunkelweizen, but in reality that could mean a darker American wheat as well. But for sake of evaluation I will go with the Dunkelweizen. With that, lets take a look at it.

The aroma is dominated by artificial cherry that reminds me of maraschino cherry. The chocolate follows closely behind, and is the artificial chocolate flavor I talked about in the post “Chocolatizing Your Beer“. Behind that is some toasted malt, but not much else that I can pick out. I don’t get much in the way of dunkelweizen, not even any of the esters or phenols you should get in the wheat beer. Still, I don’t exactly think that was the goal. If I had to describe this beer to anyone as simply as possible, it just smells like a cherry cordial you just bit into. The cherry and chocolate are a bit overdone and artificial for my taste. (5 points)

The color is a muddy brownish read, and it poured a decent head. The head disappears quite fast. The beer is quite cloudy, probably from yeast which was in the bottle. (2 points)

The flavor is not far off from the aroma. It’s not as sweet as the aroma suggests though. The cherry is artificial in flavor and reminds me of drinking the juice from the maraschino cherry jar. The chocolate is muddled in a dry and candy-like impression in flavor only (without the cloying sweetness of candy). Think of chocolate flavored hard candy and that is the type of chocolate flavor we are dealing with here. Together the two flavors remind me of chewing on the last bit of a cherry Tootsie pop, and this is even more clear in the aftertaste. The good news is there is some toasty malt flavor that is picked out with some careful attention and there is definitely some low hop bitterness. The bad is that aside from some toasty malt, there is not much support for the wheat beer side of this beer. The beer may be a bit better with some real cherry and some type of real chocolate or use malts to get the chocolate character. Very rarely do flavorings cut it when they are the focal point of the beer. (9 points)

Mouthfeel is medium-light, with some slight powdery astringency sensation in the mouth. (3 points)

Overall, the beer is not bad and pretty drinkable. The only negative points I have is the artificial aspect of the beer. The cherry and chocolate are both artificial in both the aroma and flavor. It is sad really, because both flavors are easily added to beer with real ingredients and the results is so much better. To me, this comes off more like a cheap novelty than a serious go at a specialty beer. Still, in the end the beer is avoids being so sweet you can’t enjoy it. It is drinkable, and aside from stating on the website it was a dark wheat, the label is quite honest about what it brought to the table. (4 points)

In the end, I score this beer a 23 which is equal to a C or C- in my book. The artificial parts of the beer just don’t do it for me. So its OK, but nothing to really rave about.  Is it really a fruit beer then? Or more a chemical beer? You be the judge.