Howzit Punch

Alvarado Street Brewery — Salinas, CA

20 Dec 2019 · Stephen

Sour Alvarado Street Brewery

5.5% ABV

Contributing Factors

Presentation ✓

Character ✓

Experience ✓

Return –

3 / 4 I'd recommend trying it

Tasting Notes

Appearance Hazy pink-orange to golden with a light head — the passionfruit and guava pulling the color into something tropical and vivid. Looks like a sunset over the Pacific if you squint slightly. Pouring into a clean glass at the Monterey taproom or the Aquarium Cafe, this is one of the more visually inviting fruited sours in the series.

Aroma Passionfruit leads with that unmistakable floral, intensely tropical quality — fragrant and bright in a way that guava and orange alone can't produce. The orange adds a clean citrus brightness underneath, and the guava contributes a deeper, slightly sweeter tropical note that grounds the whole aroma. The kettle sour base adds a clean lactic tartness underneath all the fruit — just enough to signal that this is a sour rather than a juice.

Palate Crisp and tart with a medium-light body that lets the POG fruit do all the talking. The passionfruit and orange carry through the middle with the guava sweetness building on the back half, the kettle sour lactic acidity providing the structural contrast that keeps the whole thing bright and refreshing rather than cloying. This is not a pastry sour — it's a fruit-forward, clean, accessible kettle sour that trusts its ingredients completely.

Finish Clean, citrus-tart, and short. The lactic acidity and passionfruit tartness resolve together quickly and completely, leaving the palate refreshed and ready. No lingering sweetness, no artificial aftertaste — just a clean POG close that makes the next sip as inevitable as the next wave.

The Verdict

Eleven years, same recipe, three major competition medals.. Howzit Punch is Alvarado Street's most enduring statement — a POG kettle sour that arrived right in 2015 and has been right ever since. The tropical Big Sur coast in a can. Howzit. Pretty good, actually.

— Stephen · Contributing Factor Brewing · 20 Dec 2019