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The beer’s bone-white head is loose, foamy, and generous, but it doesn’t stick around long. You might persuade yourself that you can see a touch of mango orange in its jewel-clear amber color, not least because you get a whiff of the fruit as soon as you open the bottle—to me it smells most like an Ataulfo mango, the golden-skinned comma-shaped variety with almost custardlike flesh. (That’s not to say I have any idea which kind Founders used. The larger, rounder Haden mango, whose skin shades from red to green, tends to be more fibrous and taste a bit of pine, especially when not fully ripe.)
The aroma also includes honey and caramel, plus something grassy and peppery that’s almost like rye but might actually be the zing of the habanero chiles, softened by fermentation. Other notes in the nose remind me of the white muscat grape and saffron in Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch, and like that beer, Mango Magnifico seems to have no hops to speak of, unless they’re the kind that smell sort of like mango—under the circumstances, though, that would be a bit of a wasted effort.
I’ll start with “La Iglesia del Odio” by French band Impureza, the title track of their 2010 full-length.
