Beer Spotlight!

Fortuna Komes Raspberry Porter

$4.99 for the 16.9oz bottle
Baltic Porter with Raspberry Juice, Vanilla, and Chilli Peppers

This beer blows our minds!

First off, it’s a lager. You’ll never believe that it’s a lager, but that’s the way Baltic Porters go. We won’t go into the whole story. (You’re probably sick of our stories, so just the short version …) The Porter style originated in England. The Baltic Porter is a variant style that developed in Eastern Europe. Baltic Porters have a touch of sourness to them and tend to be lighter bodied because — surprise twist — while all other Porters are ales, Baltic Porters are lagers. Yeah … lagers. Okay, rocketing forward …

Browar Fortuna sits in Miłosław, Poland about 30 miles east of Poznań in west central Poland. In 1889 after nearly 300 years of brewing in Miłosław, local burghers built the Fortuna Brewery. Almost 60 years later, in 1939, the Nazis seized it. After the Nazis were defeated in the war, the Communists came into power and nationalized the brewery as the country came under the sphere of the USSR.

For the next few decades, Fortuna and the rest of Miłosław’s brewing experienced a steady decline. However, Time is a unilateral task master subjecting even giant political entities to decline and not just local breweries. Poland stepped out from behind the Iron Curtain in 1990 as part of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, and, in 1995, the heirs of Fortuna’s pre-war owners got the brewery back. They spent two years renovating and then started brewing again. In 2011, the current owners bought Fortuna with an eye to producing craft beers. One change they made was to brew using open fermentation, which brings us to where we are now.

The Komes Raspberry Porter is an open-fermented Baltic Porter. Now, as we said, Baltic Porters usually have a touch of sourness to them, and open fermentation would definitely deliver that. However, the addition of raspberry juice and Madagascar vanilla beans wipes out any sourness that might have been there otherwise. That’s why the addition of the chilli peppers is a really nice touch. It’s subtle — so, so, so subtle on the finish, giving the Porter just enough of a tingle too keep it from being overrun with the fruit. The whole package is sweet and smooth with a breath of raspberries and, like we said, a hint of chiles. You won’t believe this beer is open-fermented. Maybe drinking more of it will convince yourself. That’s always our strategy.