UnBarred x Bird & Blend: Raspberry Tea Sour

We’ve teamed up with local tea mixologists, Bird & Blend, to bring both worlds of brewing together in this collaboration. Using our knowledge of beer & their knowledge of tea, we've created an exciting fusion between both brewing worlds!

Bird & Blend Tea Co. is an independent, award-winning tea company on a mission to reimagine tea and spread happiness. They have established themselves by creating the best tasting & most exciting flavour innovations in the tea business. 

The opportunity to collaborate with them to make this beer was too good to miss. The concept was to create a hybrid beer based on Bird & Blends popular "Blue Raspberry Tea" blend.

Chief Mixologist & Bird & Blend Co-Founder, Krisi says, “We chose our Blue Raspberry blend as it’s a fan-fave, it brews beautifully & we knew it would create a truly great tasting beer. The blue pea flower is one of the only places in nature where you can find food with natural blue colour & once added to the beer base it turns a deep purple that is truly unique. We also added some of our Sunny Sencha, a blend which lifts the tea notes in the beer even more!”

Starting with a Berliner Weisse malt base we fermented with a lactic producing culture to lower the pH and produce a clean flavour profile. During fermentation, we added 400kg of raspberries lending a big depth of flavour, aroma and colour.

We hopped with experimental hop "HBC 630” which gives sweet berry-like characters of raspberry and cherries.

To fine-tune our process and make this a true collaboration as a collective, we steeped blue pea shoot flowers and green tea separately in batches. We added the teas incrementally to find a sweet spot of balance. Once we found the correct levels, we increased volumes and blended with the base beer to create our Raspberry Tea Sour.

Coming in at 5.2%, Raspberry Tea Sour delivers a refreshing and tart sour with a tea twist.

On the nose, this beer delivers tangy berries and rose petals. Full bodied raspberry with a slight sweetness creates a balanced and sublime sour. This bold fruit profile is followed by subtle herbal and floral notes from the tea blend.

Raspberry Tea Sour is available now on the webshop and from Bird & Blend Tea Co.