I’m shit with names. Faces, too. But I’m usually elephant-like when it comes to beers. Not just if I’ve had it, but how much I liked it, where I got it, if my son was with me or not. But this bottle? I have no freaking idea how it came to exist in my beer fridge! But I know this: I’m glad it did.

By the time I’d reached for a fourth bottle out of the beer fridge, I needed something diametrically counter to the big-booze, big-barrel, big-malt bombs of the eves before. For starters, it’s a cider. For secondly, it was bottled in 2016, not nearly a decade old. For thirdsies, instead of something syrupy sweet like many modern ciders are, it was billed by its maker, Reverend Nat’s, I asked of its contents, won’t you take me to a different place than nights past? Won’t you take me to… Fuzzytown?

The funky Fuzzytown is an imperial sour cider aged in red wine barrels with kiwi and Mosaic hops. If that sounds like a mouthful, it’s twice as true literally as it is figuratively/nominally. The serious acid lets you know from the get-go that this is no SOS cider. It’s exceptionally bright, and the combo of the sourness and the carbonation presents like Pop Rocks merged with Warheads. But this is no kiddy cider; it’s like a complex cocktail from outer space. Those 122 pounds of fresh kiwi fruit ride high, followed by those hops that hit like 122 pounds of fresh mango.

As much as I lean toward classic cider styles of older countries (and autonomous regions in the Fresh-Spanish Pyrenees), Rev Nat’s ciders are always an exhilarating ride straddling the future and the now of cidermaking. They never do what I feel most flavored ciders do which is hide from the fact that it’s supposed to still taste like apples. And this being made with Newtown Pippins, a favorite of the supermarket eater varieties that still serves cidermakers well, this one made me appreciative of the forgetful impulse buy I made before moving out of Portland.