Boulevard’s Entwined Ale hits store shelves Tuesday

This past weekend at HopFest, Boulevard gave festivalgoers a taste of its latest release, Entwined Ale. On Tuesday, Entwined starts hitting store shelves throughout the metro in six-packs of 12-ounce bottles.

Entwined, the first release in the brewery’s experimental Backroads Beers series, was brewed with Muscat grape juice and Nelson Sauvin hops. If you’re a wine drinker who doesn’t like beer, this one’s for you. Especially if you like white wines.

Entwined is light, refreshing and dry. There’s a hint of a grape taste but no real aftertaste. And it’s really easy to drink at 10 IBUs and 4.2 percent ABV. 

Our tasting panel likened it to drinking chardonnay.

“I should get this for my wife,” said one taster. 

“I’d drink it while eating oysters,” said another.

A third taster liked the smooth drinkability. “You should take this to kickball,” he said.

So if you’re looking for a light, easy, summery beer, Entwined could be your drink.  

This is only the beginning of the Backroads series. Boulevard notes on its blog that a gose infused with dried hibiscus flowers is coming later this summer and a wet hopped beer in the fall. 
 
Jeremy Ragonese, Boulevard’s director of marketing, tells The Pitch that the Backroads series is a home for the brewery’s beers that couldn’t be easily classified. 

“Basically, it’s beers that are more experimental in nature and had oftentimes could not be classified as one particular style,” Ragonese says. “A lot of times, they were influenced by special ingredients or special processes that were used. In many cases, they were more challenging and certainly expanding on the horizons of what really constitutes beer.

“In the case of Entwined, the first official release for the Backroads, we had this particular beer on tap in the tasting room and everyone raved about it and commented that they’d love to see it come out. So we in essence had to create a home for these beers, and that’s what Backroads was born of.”