Beets Suck

I'm usually a pretty big fan of Magic Hat. Their #9 is a nice pale ale with an apricot twist, and it's a good local beer (yay Vermont) so I can take comfort in that when I order it.

I was intrigued by the tap pull of the Wacko, which featured what I thought was a heart with weird vines behind it. I saw it from pretty far away, but decided I'd order it. When it came to the table, I wasn't sure if I'd been given the right thing - it was a really bizarre magenta color. Turns out, that's no heart. It's a beet. Holding a guitar and microphone. It's a thing out of a nightmare.

A giant beet with hair. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

Wacko is brewed with beet sugar, which gives it a hot pink color. I'm not sure you can taste the flavor of beets (I mean, this beer didn't taste of dirt, so that's a start), but I'm really not sure the beet color does the beer any good. It's freaking pink, and the last time I saw a pink beer, I was mocking a table of Philadelphia Phillies fans at Boston Beer Works.

Funny side story - my buddy Russell and I were going to try getting walk-up tickets to a weird interleague Red Sox game: Philadelphia at Boston. If tickets were not an option, then what we would have spent on tickets would go to beer at Boston Beer Works across the street. Well, no tickets. Boston Beer Works has some strange brews on hand, and one was a blueberry ale with actual fresh blueberries in it. It functioned like a poor man's lava lamp: a blueberry would sink to the bottom of the glass, become the nucleation point for a bunch of bubbles, and then float to the top, where the bubbles would detatch, making the berry sink. Cute, but not for me. The aforementioned Phillies fans? Big table of 'em, all drinking pink beer with watermelon spears stuck in the glass. Gross.

It's bad when beer is the color of vomit, though it does remove some of the guesswork after of a long night out.

So anyway, what I didn't like about the Magic Hat Wacko wasn't just its ridiculous pink hue, but the flavor, which was quite middling. You could smell the grassy earthiness of the beets, but the beer itself just tasted of grain sugar, much like an American Macrobrew. Thin on the tongue, not bad, but not good.

Beer should not look like gatorade, even a little.

And that color. I still can't get past that godawful color. I bought a single bottle of it again just to grab the label. As an illustration, here's a cherry gatorade next to a glass of Wacko. That's just disturbing.