The expectation factor which comes, inevitably, with a beer created by leading Spanish chef Ferran Adria and his crew at El Bulli restaurant is always going to upstage reality. Certainly, Estrella Damm Inedit arrives packaged like an elegant princess but the taste test reveals a more common touch.

Nothing wrong with that, except the marketing hype leaves you expecting something rather special. On the beer’s website super-chef Adria is over-dubbed in English saying things like:

“This is a benchmark in beer’s historical progress and I’m sure it is going to be imitated.”

Of course, you wouldn’t expect much false modesty from the man whose restaurant has been rated as the world’s best by those who should know their onions. And it’s significant that Adria, who cemented his reputation – as far as I can gather – by rendering various ingredients into foam, should now turn his attention to another form of foam.

“We saw there was a gap to fill,” he says. “This is a drink to accompany food – it isn’t designed to replace wine but is a beer to share the world of cuisine with other drinks.”

Inedit is the result, apparently, of an extended project carried out by Adria and his sommelier team at El Bulli over a year or so. They sampled many beers and eventually created a blend or “coupage” of several different brews, arriving at a product which has a healthy portion of malted wheat, besides malted barley, and is spiced with coriander, licorice and orange peel. The style is roughly that of a Belgian witbier but the spicing is decidedly more delicate.

On the website video, a sommelier talks about the beer’s “denseness” and the “fruity bouquet of fresh yeast”, and advises us “to savour the mild carbonic gas”. That makes it sound like a sparkling mineral water but I suspect he is trying to highlight the cleansing nature of the beer.

As you might expect from one of El Bulli’s sommeliers, he goes into some detail about how to present the beer. A large white wine glass is recommended and he demonstrates pouring from a generous height to help “oxygenate” the beer. The glass should be filled to roughly one-third with a thick head of foam to maximize the visual presentation.

Once opened, the sleek, dark-green 750ml bottle should be placed in a clear plastic ice-bucket “so you can keep it at an ideal temperature”. The recommended serving temperature is 4◦C-8◦C.

Inedit is brewed by Spanish brewing giant Estrella Damm, which has been based in Barcelona  since 1876. While the original brewing group was established by German-Alsatian interests, its flagship product these days is a fairly bland lager labeled simply as Estrella Damm. 

With its fine dining connections, Inedit reminded me of a beer I tasted a couple of years ago that had been created especially for celebrity chef Rick Stein’s bunch of seafood restaurants in Padstow, Cornwall. Chalky’s Bite was named in memory of Stein’s late Jack Russell canine sidekick and was a pretty good drop, brewed by local Sharp’s Brewery. The beer was a strong, pale golden ale (6.8%), moderately hopped but seasoned with wild Cornish fennel. Seems to me these restaurant types are more at home with the spice rack than with hops which – after all – are the brewer’s spice of choice.

TASTING NOTES

ESTRELLA DAMM INEDIT (4.8%)

Hazy, pale lemon with brownish tinge; fluffy white head. Aroma: honey, spice and citrus notes with an earthy undertone. Palate: creamy mouthfeel, tart-edged mid-palate with hints of caramel, lemon zest and coriander; muted hop bitterness with delicate licorice and citrus notes lingering on. Overall: knock-out packaging aside, Inedit doesn’t quite live up to the breathless hype but this is definitely a beer which could play second fiddle to all sorts of fine food. It probably wouldn’t shine in a blind tasting but it is designed to complement food, after all, and not to compete with intense flavours. RRP: $12/750ml bottle; inquiries: drinkworks.com.au