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It's starting to look like somebody handed the keys to the nation's microbreweries to a restless vodka distiller.

Have you scanned the specialty offerings at your local beer store lately? Orange, green apple, black currant, blueberry - they sound more like new Absolut flavours than ingredients for a hearty pint.

The newest entry: Great Lakes Orange Peel Ale. The citrus-flavoured beer, launched last month, had an initial production run of 10,000 650-millilitre bottles and sold out in slightly more than three weeks, four times faster than expected.

"We thought this was going to be a three-month program," says Peter Bulut Jr., vice-president of Great Lakes Brewery in Toronto, who's hard at work loading more orange rinds and pulp into his antique copper kettle to keep up with demand.

Other newcomers to the fruit bar include Nickel Brook Green Apple Pilsener from Better Bitters Brewing Co. in Burlington, Ont.; Strawberry Anti-Social, a brown ale launched last summer by Trafalgar Ales & Meads of Oakville, Ont.; and two offerings from Ottawa-based Heritage Brewing Ltd., Passion Brew (infused with passion fruit) and Black Currant Rye Lager.

They join a list that includes more established brands such as Wraspberry from Wild Rose Brewery in Calgary and Aprikat from Alley Kat Brewing Co. in Edmonton.

Granite Brewery and Restaurant, which has locations in Toronto and Halifax, has been making Ringberry Ale out of raspberries for years. The same goes for the Blueberry Ale at Pump House Brewery in Moncton, N.B., and the apple-based Éphémère from Quebec's Unibroue.

While the brewing industry doesn't keep statistics on fruit beer consumption, independent brewers and pub owners say consumers are welcoming the fresh injection from the produce section.

"You'll see 21-year-olds now drinking everything," says Tashi Sundup, owner of Bryden's in Toronto's west end.

The pub-restaurant has 16 brews on tap, including the new Orange Peel Ale, drawn from its eye-catching orange-shaped tap handle. "People just look at the bar and say, 'What is that?' "

Traditionally, fruit beers were most often associated with spring and the start of the fruit season, when people in northern climates crave garden flavours. That's why Mr. Bulut launched his Orange Peel Ale in April, notwithstanding the fact that oranges have zilch to do with Canada's springtime harvest.

But there's a more contemporary impetus behind today's trend. Seasonally available fruit enables brewers to seize on the kind of cyclical buzz and pent-up consumer demand typically enjoyed by the fastest-growing segment of the alcoholic-beverage market, wine.

With delicate wine grapes, each fall can bring a radically new harvest, leading to significant variations in flavour. That's why collectors pay studious attention to vintage dates on bottles. Not so with beer, which is made from grain, a relatively homogeneous raw material whose flavour varies negligibly from season to season.

"A limited-release beer is almost like a vintage wine," says Mr. Bulut of Great Lakes.

Dave Jamieson, head brewer at Trafalgar Ales & Meads, agrees. "Seasonal beers are good for the market because people always want what they can't have."

More generally, for small brewers, fruit offers a conspicuous and affordable point of differentiation amid a sea of taste-alike monster brands backed by multimillion-dollar ad campaigns.

Fruit beers are not a modern invention. Fruits and vegetables have been used as adjuncts in beer for centuries. Historically, they were often substituted when the grain harvest fell short. But in some regions, ingredients such as cherries, raspberries and peaches have become intrinsic to enduring styles, most notably the sweetly seductive Lambic beers of Belgium.

Technically fruit beers are easy to make, a matter of adding fruit to the fermenting vat, though some brewers take a shortcut by adding flavoured extracts to the finished product.

But striking the right balance between the fruit's sweetness and the beer's fundamental bitterness is key. While the Belgian Lambic style is a growing inspiration to North American brewers, the general preference in Canada is for drier fruit beer.

Who's quaffing all that malty fruit? If you guessed mainly women, you might be wrong.

"Women drink a lot more fruit beers in public, but if it was just women, I don't think sales would be as high as they are," says Mr. Jamieson, who makes a popular series of fruit-infused, honey-based brews known as meads. Among his most popular flavours: raspberry, blueberry and black currant.

He adds that men who order fruit meads in his store regularly go out of their way to explain that they are shopping for their "girlfriends," a story he usually takes with a grain of salt.

The fruit beer buildup hasn't been without its missteps or amusing exaggerations. In what might be called an example of the latter, Caledonian Brewing Co. of Edinburgh, Scotland, recently launched Top Banana, a popular brew made with not just any banana but the politically correct fair-trade variety.

"Banana is a nasty one in my opinion," says Mr. Jamieson of Trafalgar. "A lot of things that go wrong in the brewery have the smell of banana."

There are far more repulsive possibilities, however. "The weirdest one I saw was garlic and black pepper," Mr. Jamieson says. "I tasted it in Arizona. And it was as bad as you'd think."

Fear of failure hasn't dissuaded craft brewers from pondering new possibilities. Mr. Jamieson says cantaloupe, starfruit and mango are overlooked candidates. Pumpkin is another classic that was popular during pioneer times and deserves a revival, he says.

But the guiding principle for brewers might best be summed up by the title of a sitcom: Curb your enthusiasm.

"My second brewer wants to make a banana-bread beer," Mr. Jamieson says. "He's had bad ideas before that worked out, though. If he behaves, maybe in the fall."

Picks of the week

Great Lakes Orange Peel Ale, $4.95/650-ml bottle

Enticing bronze-orange colour. Slightly creamy texture, with just a whisper of orange flavour and plenty of invigorating bitterness from the fruit peel and hops. Refreshing, deftly balanced and food-friendly. Excellent.

Trafalgar Black Currant Mead, $12.95/650-ml bottle

Fermented from a combination of honey and malted barley. True taste of fresh black currants, with a flavour that starts sweet but finishes crisp and dry. Faintly effervescent. Warning: The well-hidden, nine-per-cent alcohol can sneak up.

Nickel Brook Green Apple Pilsener, $11.95/six-pack

Intense flavour of green apple, almost to the point of tasting like Jolly Rancher candy. Veers into cider-cooler terrain because of its off-dry character, but the beer flavour and bitterness come through on the clean finish.

bcrosariol@globeandmail.com