Missing Link

Missing Link | Prickly Pear Mexican Lager

What Is Missing Link?
Missing Link is a Mexican Lager brewed with real prickly pear, the fruit of the Opuntia cactus. It is the one beer in the Dino line named after something that never had bones, which is either a paleontology joke or an oversight, depending on who you ask around here.

What Does It Taste Like?
Clean and dry the way a Mexican Lager ought to be, with the prickly pear doing most of its work on the eye before it ever reaches the tongue. The fruit is gentler than the aroma suggests: soft melon, a little watermelon, a whisper of something like bubblegum on the way out. Nothing heavy, nothing sweet, nothing in the way.

What Makes It Different?
Prickly pear is one of the quietest fruits we work with. It carries almost no acid of its own, a pH north of 5.4, which is remarkably high for a fruit, and very little fermentable sugar. Put it in a big beer and it vanishes. A Mexican Lager is about as much room as we can give it, which is exactly the point.

The colour runs on different chemistry too. Most red and purple fruit get there through anthocyanins, while prickly pear uses betalains, the same pigment family as beets and amaranth. Betalains hold steady across the pH range of beer where other natural colours shift or wash out. What they dislike is prolonged heat and light, which is a fancy way of saying drink this one started bright pink, but reached your glass a crystal clear sunset sand color.