Sour Ale Tasting

Jumping straight from “Beer: 101″ to “Beer: 401″, this was the second in a series of self-hosted monthly beer tastings.  We pulled in a crowd of seventeen for a sampling of nine different beers and what turned into a discussion of the attendees’ spirit animals.  No joke. 

Beers for this event were, understandably, a little harder to track down than those for the prior beer tasting, which focused on exemplary beers from a variety of common beer styles.  My first destination was Healthy Spirits, which has fast become my favorite beer purveyor as (A) it’s close enough that even with a backpack full of beer I can still walk home, and (B) I can’t think of a better use than a few freezer cases than filling it with their beer selection.  From there, it was a short zip over the City Beer Store to round out the line-up.  CBS makes up for their distance from The Monkeyhouse with an even larger selection that never fails to entice me into buying far more than I intended upon entering. 

The final tasting list was:

Flemish-style Red Ales

• Duchesse de Bourgogne
• Rodenbach Grand Cru
• Panil Barriquee

Flemish-style Oud Bruins

• Ichtegem’s Grand Cru
• Monk’s Café Flemish Sour Ale*

Fruited Wild Ales

• Russian River Supplication
• Birrifico Montegioco’s Quarta Runa**

Gueuze

• Cantillon Classic Gueuze
• Russian River Beatification

Other

• The Monkeyhouse Grains of Wrath IPA***

*Not served because I lost it in my fridge.  With most of my usual beer-accommodating space taken up, this bottle went into the butter compartment on the door, and wasn’t discovered until the next day. 

**A suggestion from CBC, this was not actually sour and it’s not clear if it is wild, so it didn’t really fit the theme of the event, which I didn’t discover until we opened it that night.

***This obviously did not fit the bill of the event either, but was an exciting public debut for The Monkeyhouse’s first brew

In the Flemish-style red ales, the Rodenbach Grand Cru was the clear winner in my mind.  It and the Duchesse de Bourgognewere similar and both very full flavored, but the Rodenbach was a little less sweet and a little more tart, which I thought provided a better balance of flavors.  The Panil Barriquee stood out clearly from the other two, with a much smoother and more subtle.  The tastes in the Barriquee were integrated together in a more cohesive way than in the first two, whose tastes seem to pop out of nowhere mid-sip to surprise the drinker.  I preferred the latter profile for probably the same reason I prefer California cabernets to French Bordeaux - I like getting a full wallop of flavor, even if it means sacrificing a little subtlety.

I had the Jolly Pumpkin La Rojalast night at Bar Crudo’s April beer dinner and thought it would have been a nice addition to the line-up above if I had known about it.

In the oud bruins, well, we only had one due to the butter compartment mix-up mentioned above.  It was cool to taste how a beer that seems so similar to a Flanders red relative to the full range of beer styles, and even is identified as one on its own label, actually tastes quite different when sampled back-to-back with reds.  I liked it, but preferred the red ales as a style, given that they were both more sweet and more tart than the mellower Ichtegem’s Grand Cru. 

In the fruited wild ales, we had my other favorite of the night, the Russian River Supplication, and a bit of a surprise in that the Quarta Runa.  The Quarta Runa wasn’t really a sour ale, and so far as I can tell was not wild either.  This is a shame because I think it would have been better sampled alongside more comparable beers.  With all the sour beers we had tasted so far, the non-sour beer fell a little flat on palates expecting some pucker. 

The Supplication, on the other hand, is a beer that I will probably never be able to get enough of, quite literally, since there are only a limited number of bottles out there to be bought.  The Supplication has so much going on between the sour cherries in the brew, the Brettanomyces yeast and the Lactobacillus and Pediococcus bacteria that fermented it, and the oak and Pinot Noir flavors from the barrel aging process.  It is quite tart, but the interplay of all these flavors together gives it a complexity that the other beers couldn’t quite match, much as I loved them.  The Brett flavor was mild, although it was awesome that even the first time drinkers of craft beer noticed it.  Before I got a chance to explain it someone asked, “Why does the cherry one smell like gym socks?”  After telling the group that they had horse-y smelling wild yeast in their beer, not to mention bacteria, a few were skeptical that this was really a coveted beer.  However, I don’t think there were any skeptics left once everyone had given it a taste. 

The gueuze round really knocked home the point about Brett.  As we were passing around the Beatification and the Cantillon I told everyone to give them a sniff and the point was settled once and for all that, yup, good beer really can smell like a saddle blanket.  I also got a chance to put my new theory out there:

•           American beer fad on its way out - extreme hops
•           American beer fad reaching its peak - barrel aging
•           American beer fad just ramping up - spontaneous fermentation
•           American beer fad yet to be - low/no hop beers: bocks & gruits?

Extreme hops: Everyone has done the super-hopped thing by now, and I think it would have died down already if it hadn’t been for the shortage, which tempted rebellious-by-nature brewers across the country to spit in the eye of prudence and market dynamics.  It may sound like I’m not a fan, but that’s not true, I just think it’s been overdone and genuinely delicious high hop beers (see: pretty much the entire Stone portfolio) have given way to some hops-for-the-sake-of-hops beers.  

Barrel aging: I love this trend and am so happy that it seems like everyone has one now.  The barrels are a whole new dimension for brewers to play with, in addition to the old standards of malt, hops, and yeast.  Not only is there a question of which wood to use (most go with Oak but Dogfish Head’s new brown uses Palo Santo), there is the issue of what prior experience the barrels have.  Brewers right now are playing with a variety of wine barrels (as with the pinot barrels used in the Supplication above), bourbon barrels (as with those used in the Allagash Curieux or the Lost Abbey Angel’s Share or Firestone’s Velvet Merkin), and brandy barrels (as with North Coast’s Old Stock). 

Spontaneous fermentation: So far, Russian River (Beatification) and Allagash (TBD) are the only American brewers I know of with 100% spontaneously fermented beers, but where they go, I’m sure others will soon follow.  Be on the look out for more of these to come.

Minimal hops: Now that the realities of the hops situation have hit home and Imperial IPAs are getting a little overexposed, I’m hoping some people see it as an opportunity to introduce malt-driven styles like bocks that have gotten little attention before, or herb bittered gruits that are virtually unknown to-date.  I haven’t seen much evidence of this yet, except for the gruit at Magnolia (see upcoming post), but I’m expecting it.