[bower]

Considering the amount of hard and unevenly ripened fruit I had to look at this summer, it was a real relief to have at least one slicer with no hardness, pale spots, or any adverse effects on texture at all.
I started six seedlings of the Beist F2, and one of them flowered early which is as I expected from a 1/4 ratio. Besides the ultra smooth texture and the earliness of this black beef in spite of the cold, this F2 and its siblings had a very dense fruiting pattern as I also noticed in the F1. The plant did lose a main stem to mold - as did many others - but it recovered well and went on to fruit well into the late season.
In spite of these advantages which make it worth growing further, the early Beist didn't have the intensity of taste which I hoped for, although its late fruit were sweet it was overall pretty mild. So we have plans to grow out more of the F2's looking for a lineup of Beistly candidates to trial against one another in the future.