Time for one final tasting. The bottles (12oz) were primed with one Cooper's carbonation drop. The bottle sounds like a moderately carbonated beer when opened, and there is a thin, orange tinted layer of sediment on the bottom of the bottle. If nothing else, this definitely shows that this technique is viable for producing bottle-carbonated hard beverages that are not bone-dry.
Appearance is clear orange-yellow. It's definitely not the vibrant orange of Tang. It's more like pils with a hint of orange food coloring. If you look at the header on the top of the message board, it's about the color of the head in the beer glass on the right side (just above the BA logo). The orange-white head drops almost immediately to a faint ring.
The nose still has a bit of the yeasty, banana-estery note that I noticed in the flat samples at bottling. But either time or cold serving temperatures have diminished it significantly. There's some orange Tang notes in the nose, but those are faint as well.
The flavor is tart and fleeting. The banana ester is still there, but not as strongly as I noted before. The orange, Tangy flavor is there, but that drops off quick as well. There is a bit of a seltzer character, too. It's definitely not quite sweet enough, but it's not bone dry either. It's almost like fountain orange soda where the syrup is just about to run out. The finish is faint SweeTart candy.
Surprisingly, this isn't all that bad. If you added some sugar at serving time this might be pretty nice. I might actually give this another go sometime with a little more DME, and possibly a few different yeasts. Malternative beverages might just be doable for the bottle-conditioning brewer. Pretty cool.