Beer Review: Fatum: Member Berry (Tattered Flag)

Last Thursday I got to have lunch at Tattered Flag, and what a delicious lunch it was. I ordered the Shepherd’s Pie and the Fatum: Member Berry. Both were delicious, both were tasty, both made for an excellent lunch time treat.

This is the final day of October, some may know it as October 31st, or Halloween, or All Hallow’s Eve, or the day before November, or in the case of 2019, the day after the Nationals won the World Series (….ugh….); but it is the final day of October, so I am shooting out a review here in the morning, and then planning (fingers crossed, hopefully… you never know…. life is crazy… yadda yadda yadda, the clam bisk [Seinfeld joke for the win]) another beer review posting after taking the kiddos around for Trick or Treat tonight (…once again, hopefully the storms hold out and we get to do that).

For November though, and in celebration of it being NaNoWriMo, I am tentatively – hopefully – possibly – fingers crossed again – wanting – going to do a post a day. Write a new post, every day, and post it each day; as kind of my nod to NaNoWriMo, so stay tuned for that. Be sure to follow us to stay up to date on that, and to see if I can actually hold myself accountable with that given the hectic life I have.

So moving on from there, lets get down to this.

Beer: Fatum: Member Berry
Brewery: Tattered Flag
Style: Sour – Fruited
ABV: 6%
IBU: No IBU
Untappd Write-Up: This Tart ale was conditioned on Blueberries, Strawberries, and Aronia Berries.

Lets start off with this, its a beautiful beer, and the food to pair with it (Shepard’s Pie) was fantastic and beautiful too. The name is great and perfectly goes with the style and the fact that it uses blueberries, strawberries, and aronia berries. For those of you unfamiliar with the name, its from South Park and one of the better creations they’ve had in recent years. While the show has tailed off a bit in recent years, PC Principal and Member Berries is probably their best newest additions and aspects of the show.

Also, for those of you unfamiliar with them – myself included – aronia berries: “Aronia is a genus of deciduous shrubs, the chokeberries, in the family Rosaceae native to eastern North America and most commonly found in wet woods and swamps. The genus is usually considered to contain two or three species, one of which is naturalized in Europe ” (Source: Wikipedia)

Now that we did our knowledge and information passing on (and knowing is half the battle!) … (thanks GI Joe), we can get get down to the review.

Appearance is a dark purplish hue. It does have a glowy look to it under certain light, but mostly its dark hued, purple, and with an unfiltered look to it. Not thick or smoothie thick or styled, but unfiltered, and with the dark purplish look to it, it is mostly opaque unless a bright light shined on it.

Aroma is very heavy berry, you can pick up all three of the main berries mentioned and used in the beer. You get very powerful notes of blueberry and aronia, you get this slight faint whiff of strawberry at the end that kind of softens the other two berries. I want to guess maybe a possibility of some lactose or vanilla as there is a hint of it, but when drinking, there is no taste of it, so not sure if its included or not.

Taste is very tart, puckable, but not too bad as to be untasty or detrimental. All three berries get equal playing time on this field, with maybe strawberries having the least flavorful impact (probably for the best for me, as I’m not a huge strawberry person). The blueberries are a very nice sweet and tart, not a heavy funky, the strawberries provide a bit of light flavor mostly at the end of the beer, and the aronia berries provide equal measures of sweet and sour, almost making a kind of lemonade-ish taste to add as a backbone to the beer. The three berries combined really makes for an interesting and tasty combination and concoction.

My Untappd Rating: ****.25
Global Untappd Rating: 3.81 (as of 10.31.19)

And for those foodies out there wondering, the Shepherd’s Pie was to die for. Wonderful and very tasty (though I was called a lamb murderer quite a bit by my partner at the table).

The Member Berry probably won’t be on tap long at Tattered Flag, so if you want it, make sure you jump on that and stop in and try it out soon!

And as I said, we are kicking off November big here at The Beer Thrillers. To celebrate NaNoWriMo month I am planning on writing an article, blog post, beer review, brewery review, whatever, every day of the month – that means a minimum of 30 new blog posts – and thats just from me. No counting or saying what J. Doncevic will do. I have also reached out to several fellow beer bloggers through WordPress’s Reader and contacted them to see if they would like to do some guest writing (as well as us doing guest writing for them). If there’s one thing craft beer and craft breweries have taught me, is that there’s nothing wrong with collaboration and it just makes the community stronger. So be on the look out for all of that. Also be on the look out soon for me and J. Doncevic’s first joint-post about the 3rd Anniversary party at Boneshire Brew Works.

Also as a note, I walked by the future home of the Rubber Soul building today in Hummelstown. The progress is getting more and more noticeable. Their doing a new roof, their doing the flooring now, after having gutted the building, put up new doors and windows, etc. They also now finally have a banner announcing that it is indeed in fact Rubber Soul Brewing on the fence surrounding the property. According to the Hummelstown’s The Sun newspaper they are looking at a January target date for opening (that seems a bit ambitious with today being Oct. 31st and that giving them only November, December, and January itself to finish the building and brewing, but we’ll see).

Make sure to be like, follow, and subscribe, and do all that fancy stuff here and on all of our social media pages – FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc, so you can keep up to date on our goings ons!

Cheers all!

-B. Kline