If you're going to call a beer Fresh, you'd better make for damned certain it tastes like it. Luckily for CR/AK, this delicious fresh-bomb is a delight to drink and tastes like it's just been canned.
CR/AK achieve this by ensuring the cold chain is continued from brewery to store and they insist that it's kept in the fridge, keeping it as fresh as possible to allow the flavours to really stand out.
The hop profile is complex, with Strata, El Dorado and double-dry-hopped with more El Dorado, Strata, Citra Cryo and Simcoe Cryo. This gives a fruity flavour, a little bit tropical and a little bit not, that combines with a piney, resinous element from all the dry-hopping.
The fruitiness of this can't be overrated. As soon as the can's popped you get a big hit of fruit with just a little resinous, dank aroma to stop it being sweet as such. The pour releases more of those fruity aromas, with a definite citrus angle to them.
There's a little sediment in the pour which I don't mind at all, and the opaque pale-yellow colour is simply gorgeous, making it all the more appealing to the eye. The flavour is sharp at first, the kind of tangy fruitiness that you get from biting into a really ripe mango, but there's a bit hit of those resin flavours too which help to bring balance to the force of the fruit.
The texture is big and bold, but the flavours' assist this and give enough backing to the bubbly texture to make it work. The aftertaste is a little bitter, with the pine, resin notes taking centre stage into the aftertaste which I wasn't expecting based on the big fruit smells and flavours at the top of the profile.
White as a colour screams fresh, maybe it's something to do with the association to clean and new that white has, but either way it's a very shrewd choice of label for CR/AK.
The label itself keeps things fresh in both senses of the word with a clean and simple black font on the whole-white label that is about as no-frills as an IKEA cabinet, but serves to do the job.
The can plays host to a wealth of information on the back, more than other breweries as they have the info in both Italian and English, but the small font and slanted style make it seem a lot less busy. It's very stylish, which is no less than you'd expect from an Italian beer.
We got ours from Honest Brew so that's where you'll be better placed to get your hands on this fresh and fiesty beer, but keep an eye on the local bottle shops too.
