Brewery – Urban Artifact
Beer – Warmug
Style – Golden Fruited Coffee Sour
ABV – 7.5%

Golden Fruited Coffee Sour Ale. A collaboration with Wolf’s Ridge Brewing, Market Garden Brewery, and One Line Coffee. 1,500 lbs of peaches, 750lbs of passion fruit, 250lbs of plums, and 45lbs of whole natural washed coffee beans blended into a Golden Sour Ale base.

The brewery’s official description does a really nice job of telling you what you’re about to drink when you pour this into your glass – but where it lacks is in preparing you for what you’re about to experience when you do so.  This beer is not just weird… it’s downright crazy.

When I first saw the label for this beer, I thought it might even be a joke – throw a stint with a little barrel aging, and this beer hits nearly every single one of the current beer trends (they should have called it a NE Style Golden Fruited Coffee Sour).  But I quickly realized that no… this is just something that Urban Artifact would totally do.  Not only that, but they managed to wrangle in a couple other fantastic breweries from here in Ohio to do it with them.

You read that right, Warmug is a collaboration between Urban Artifact, Wolf’s Ridge Brewing and Market Garden – in fact, that’s how the name Warmug came about, it’s an anagram of the three breweries thrown together (WR – UA – MG).  They reached out to One Line Coffee for the Costa Rican coffee beans to finish it all out.

My Thought’s On Urban Artifact Warmug

Dear lord… this beer is a journey for sure.  In the glass it’s a light, orangish yellow color – looking like you would expect from a Golden Fruited Sour.

The aromas are full of fresh summer fruit… peaches and passion fruit hit hard, but then behind it all you can start to pick up something “else”, and it’s hard to identify what that is, if you don’t already know.

The flavor is the shining star here – it starts out with a sour lactic punch of fruit – the passionfruit specifically stands strong and tall in the front, with the stone fruit background rounding it out.  I’d be happy if the taste ended there, but it’s far from over.  As the fruit starts to leave the palate, you’re hit with a rolling background of a coffee finish which doesn’t last long.  It dances around for a few seconds before leaving you confused, not sure if you tasted it to begin with… maybe you imagined it – and thus it goes sip after sip… trying to figure out what’s happening in your glass.

Amazingly weird, and deliciously different.  It’s a work of art on a lot of different levels.  Bravo.