Have you heard of Miller Chill ? Coors has, and they knew Miller Brewing Company was selling a lot of it. So, despite the fact the two are trying to merge (as long as the US Government allows it), Coors decided they would roll out a lime-accented beer of their own under their Blue Moon specialty label: Rising Moon Spring Ale.

Rising Moon is an “amber wheat ale”, basically a wheat ale brewed with a higher percentage of barley malt (caramel malt apparently) than wheat malt. To add a little “zest” (as Coors puts it), Rising Moon is also made with Kiefer lime leaves and peel to make this a crisp, light spring beer.

Lemon and wheat beer have been companions for a long time. South of the (US) border, it’s quite common to add lime to your beer, ala Miller Chill or the ubiquitous lime-bedecked Corona. And if that’s how you enjoy your beer, more power to you. Coors, however, has created a strange concoction with Rising Moon, mostly in the ratio of ingredients used.

Coors has already stated that they want the Blue Moon line to become a bigger line of craft beers, maybe even ala Sam Adams. And maybe that’s why here they added as much caramel malt as they did, trying to make this a bigger badder wheat beer perhaps. In the end, it didn’t work for me, and here’s why.

Rising Moon Spring Ale pours to a bright orange color with a light fizzy head formation and a soft malty nose. I take a sip and get a combination of tart wheat flavor and a little caramel malt flavors. OK, so where’s the lime? It’s there, beneath the malt as a light accent, but I can tell you that if you drink this one too cold you probably won’t pick much of it up. It does show up a bit in the finish, too, adding a citric tartness to balance off the malt and wheat.

Overall, though, I don’t really like this beer. Mostly because the ingredients don’t work all that well together. I think the citric lime doesn’t jive with the caramel malt flavors. More wheat malt and less caramel would have probably made this a much better beer, one the tart lime would have worked better with. And even then it would have been a better summer beer than a spring one.

Not a beer I can really recommend.

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