When you think Scottish booze you think whisky, naturally. But Scottish soft drinks? Iron Brew all the way, and Vault City have taken this iconic Scotch drink and worked their sour magic on it to create Iron Brew sour.
Known for their sours, Vault City love experimentation and with Iron Brew being so close to home it's a wonder it's taken the Scottish sour masters so long to bring Iron Brew into their lab.
Part of Vault City's foray into canning their beers, Iron Brew sour aims to stay as true to the original recipe of the soft drink as possible. The original recipe was always famed to have been made with 'girders', but sadly due to physics and health and safety reasons, it's not possible to include them for real.
It pours bright orange and you would expect no less, anything less than radioactive orange would be a disappointment. The smell is also exactly like iron brew, that kinda-fruity kinda-sweet aroma that's hard to place, but full of nostalgia.
It's very hard to write this review without saying it's basically alcoholic Iron Brew, but it's basically alcoholic Iron Brew. The flavour is uncannily similar with the only difference being the initial sharp hit of tanginess followed by a little more sourness once the fizz dies down than in the soft version.
The aftertaste keeps a lot of the artificially sweet flavour that makes Iron Brew so dangerous for small children, but also has a fairly subtle sourness to it which verges on the edge of bitterness but doesn't quite make it.
Despite being a collaboration Vault City have to stop short of blatantly copying the can design of Iron Brew, but this is fairly close. It has the bright orange colour with the iconic blue stripe and i'm pretty sure the font is the same too.
Vault City have forgone their usual template label style for this one, with the brewery logo matching the orange colour and featuring at the bottom of the blue stripe instead of in the white band around the bottom that features on their other beers.
It's definitely eye-catching and if you didn't know better you'd think someone had left a can of Iron Brew on the beer shelf by accident, but this is no accident.
Initially, this was a limited edition run which has now sold out pretty much everywhere, but i've heard it on good authority that this will become part of VC's core range of products so hopefully there's be a plentiful supply even outside of Scotland soon!
