Saison: Day 3

My third day of Saison involves two more European numbers, the Scottish brewed Origin by Natural Selection Brewing and Wrath by Danish brewers Amager.

Origin is a 5.5% 'New World Saison' brewed by four students of the International Centre for Brewing and Distilling at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh. The label informs me that I should expect rye and galaxy hops. It pours a hazy orange colour with a creamy rocky head. As is typical of the style the carbonation is effervescent. The aroma is dry and dusty hay tinged with horse blanket. There's some sour dough breadiness there too and a little tropical fruitiness. This is a beautiful dry crisp beer with a long lasting bitter finish. It's refreshingly tart and has a nice blend of spicy, almond-like maltiness mixed with distinct citrus flavours.

My next beer is Wrath, a 6.5% barrel-aged Saison from Denmark. Part of Amager's Sinner Series the label is particularly impressive, and so too is the beer. It's a slightly hazy copper coloured brew, medium to high carbonation with a rocky long lasting off-white head. The aroma is vinous, dark fruits, malt, marzipan, banana and yeast funk. There are hints of mineral too. The taste is fairly malt dominated – toasty biscuit, chocolate and vanilla sweetness, Terry's Chocolate Orange comes to mind as well. The hop character is moderately bitter with an earthy woodiness. The finish isn't particular dry but has a mild acidity to it. Overall this is a bold complex beer that is a delight to drink.

Saison: Day 2

My second day of Saison takes me north of Wallonia into Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium to sample Urthel Saissonière, a beer awarded Europe's best seasonal pale ale medal at the 2010 World Beer Awards. From Urthel I leave mainland Europe and travel across the channel to England to try out the Bristol Beer Factory Saison and finally I end up in Aberdeenshire at that bastion of bombasticity – Brewdog to take in the delights of their seasonal offering, Electric India.

Neither of these three beers are listed as recommended examples in the BJCP list so according to their guidelines in each of these beers I should find – 'a refreshing, medium to strong fruity/spicy ale with a distinctive yellow-orange colour, highly carbonated, well hopped, and dry with a quenching acidity.' Sounds good to me, so on with the tasting...

The Urthel brewery was founded in 2000 by brewer Hildegard Van Ostaden and husband Bas, who deals with marketing and design, in Flanders, Belgium. Since 2006 most of their brewing has been done at the Koningshoeven brewery in the Netherlands which is also home to the Trappist La Trappe family of beers. Saisonnière is, according to their website a blond 6% 'unique combination of Saison and white beer' brewed with 20% wheat. It pours hazy and golden with a short lasting white foamy head and an effervescent level of carbonation. The nose is bright, hoppy and citrusy revealing a slight banana/sweet malt aroma and a touch of must. The body is medium-light with spicy hops and lemons coming through. The finish is typically dry and refreshing with a bitter, grapefruit-tart bite at the end. Overall this is a very crisp, accessible and sessionable beer. It's not as characterful as the Saison Dupont but it isn't trying to be a style defining beer, it's an unashamed hybrid that has sacrificed full on Saison funk for a slice of Witbier smooth.

Having left the Saison motherland and ventured into England I suppose all subsequent beers I try can be deemed interpretations or homages to the style. The 6.5% Bristol Beer Factory Saison comes in a 500ml bottle with a rather uninspiring brown/yellow label fused with a touch of Brewdog devil may care, worn screen print slap-dashery. Label aside the beer itself is fantastic. It pours cloudy golden-copper, lively and effervescent with a foamy off-white head that leaves large lacing on the glass. The nose is aggressively yeasty with a zingy, prickly pepperiness. It's an intense aroma that, compounded with the fizzing CO2 really sticks in your nose and gets your mouth watering. The initial onslaught of aroma subsides to reveal malty caramel, banana, vanilla and sour dough. It's medium-bodied with an almost chewy spelt bread and marmalade, Munich malt flavour leading to a very dry and bitter noble hop finish that is both spicy and earthy. Definitely the hoppiest beer so far and one I would happily return to again.

The final beer of today's travels is Electric India, a 7.2% 'hoppy saison' from Brewdog. I feel further analysis of this beer requires a shift in style to a more didactical magniloquence better suited to the Brewdog ethos.

I uncompromisingly poured the bold beer into the irreverent glass. The carbonation wasn't effervescent like the other saisons but it had soul, and purpose - it made the beer fizzy. It was golden, not in a soulless industrially produced way but in an ironic rebellious way. The aroma? You guessed it – yeast, hay, banana, pineapple, malt. That's five more aromas than a corporate commodity concoction can ever conceive of containing. I ditched the olfactory stage of analysis and said hello to the gustatory one. It was yeasty and fruity. It was light bodied. It had an uncompromising bitter, peppery aftertaste. There was bread and orange and lychees. Fuck yeah, Lychees!

It was... surprisingly well balanced actually. The label promised 'An unholy union between a Belgian Saison and an Indian Pale Ale.' but instead I drank an easy-going, fairly crisp not particularly outstanding or memorable beer. Not bad, just not great either.

Saison: Day 1

My trip through the world of classical beer styles starts in the French speaking Wallonia Region of Southern Belgium with Saison. Historically a low abv beer brewed to slake the thirst of the seasonal farm workers Saison has evolved from the ~3% beer it once was into a much stronger all year round brew that now satisfies the demands of a growing global market of beer fans.

Almost ubiquitous in the repertoire of North American craft breweries, the resurgent interest over the past decade in this once endangered style by US brewers and drinkers alike has elevated Saison from its lowly origins to a place alongside the world's major beer styles.

The American produced BJCP style guidelines lists the following commercial examples of Saison to be good examples of the style:

Saison Dupont

Fantôme Saison

Saison de Pipaix

Saison Regal

Saison Voisin

Lefebvre Saison 1900

Ellezelloise Saison 2000

Saison Silly

Southampton Saison

New Belgium Saison

Pizza Port SPF 45

Lost Abbey Red Barn Ale

Ommegang Hennepin

I was able to get hold of three of the Belgian produced beers on this list so it is with Saison Dupont, Saison Voisin and Lefebvre Saison 1900 that my journey begins.

Saison Dupont (6.5%) from the Hainaut province is widely viewed as the Saison touchstone and the beer that inspired a generation of American brewers to turn their hand to this once little-known style. It currently holds a 99% rating on ratebeer.com and 94% on beeradvocate.com. It's an effervescent, hazy straw coloured beer with a coarse, foamy white head. The aroma is phenolic cloves, pepper, orange peel and a spicy, somewhat abrasive earthiness. Complex but enticing. It is medium bodied with a dry refreshing aftertaste revealing more earthy bitterness, citrus fruit and grassy notes. Rarely do I find a much praised beer lives up to the hype but Saison Dupont delivered admirably, remaining interesting and involving until the end.

Next up was Saison Voisin (5%), another beer from the Hainaut province although that was all it had in common with Saison Dupont. It pours a golden copper colour with high carbonation and a long lasting foamy head. Aroma is bready and slightly funky with a floral sweetness. It is tarter, drier and thinner than the Dupont with a milder bitter finish. Overall a much less interesting drink but refreshing and unchallenging enough to be enjoyed idly on a hot evening.

The third Belgian Saison I sampled was Lefebvre Saison 1900 (5.4%) from the Walloon Brabant Province that borders the Hainaut province to the right. It's an attractive golden coloured beer that's less carbonated than the other two. The aroma is not particularly intense, hinting at toffee sweetness and breadiness and developing a mild pepperiness as the beer warms up.This is a fairly clean, dry beer with subtle toasted caramel notes, vanilla, bitter orange and spice. A little tartness comes through in the finish but it is dominated by the sweeter maltier flavours.The least interesting of the three Saisons, it does have the best label however.

Tour de beer

I have to confess I'm a sucker for a gimmick. When I see an array of new beers to try my first instinct is to go for the edgiest style-busting beast of a beer possible. I'm wooed by their roguish charms, their rebellious nature and the aspirational cool factor that such a 'fuck you convention!' beer offers. Perfectly executed examples of traditional styles just don't get a look in.

This is all well and good but it's left serious gaps in my technical beer knowledge. If you were to give me two bottles of Kölsch and ask me 'which of these more faithfully represents the style?' I honestly couldn't tell you. I could give you a subjective opinion on which I thought was the better beer but not an objective assessment of their adherence to the recognized style guidelines.

To address this problem I want to take a tour through the world of beer styles, stopping for a while at each one to enjoy the view. I don't want this to be a regimented whistle-stop tour but more of a gentle flânerie. I've decided to use the 2008 BJCP style guidelines as a reference point for this journey, namely because they offer an easy to access list of commercially available beers for each style. I'll record all the beers I try here as well as any other interesting information I find along the way.

First style: Saison

Profound Madness: Wortley Beer Festival

On Friday night I paid a visit to the Wortley Men's Club beer festival - an intimate, well run affair raising money for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance. Now, I have to admit I'm not a massive fan of beer festivals per se. Standing shoulder to shoulder in a noisy, sweaty marquee and drinking out of a sticky, unwashed glass isn't exactly my idea of the perfect beer sampling environment, but we'll leave that polemic for another day. I purchased my half-pint festival tankard and beer tokens and made my way through what seemed like a downpour of apocalyptic proportions into the lively marquee where I was greeted with a choice of thirteen hand-pulls, seven ciders, a couple of lagers and three foreign bottled beers.

Ale for sale:

Acorn Brewery - Old Moor Porter 4.4% & Madness 4.5%

Abbeydale Brewery – Profundity 4.1%

Rudgate Brewery - Grain of Britain 4.0%

Kelham Island Brewery - Pride of Sheffield 4.0%

Saltaire Brewery - Cascade Pale Ale 4.8%

Wold Top Brewery - Headland Red 4.3%

Goose Eye Brewery – Goose Eye Bitter 3.9%

Bradfield Brewery - Farmer's Blonde 4.0%

Geeves Brewery - Gunwhale Dance 4.2%

Captain Cook Brewery – Slipway 4.2%

Harthill Brewery - Hart's Desire 4.2%

Ossett Brewery - Silver Link 4.6%

It's safe to say that these beers wouldn't appeal to your hardened beer geek - there are no barrel aged, imperial anythings here. The festival tasting notes reveal that Pale Rider at 5.2% has the dubious honour of being strongest beer of the festival. For the seasoned beer ticker there's not a lot to get pulses racing either. None of the beers are particularly rare – of the thirteen on offer when I arrived, seven of them I'd tried before.

What the festival does offer however is a fun, relaxed environment for the average drinker to experiment and try things he/she wouldn't normally. Here were a selection of bitters, pales, and golden beers that demonstrated the world of flavour that real ale has to offer, even if you are only really dancing on the tip of the whole top fermented iceberg. These are safe beers, unchallenging but not unassuming. Beers that your lifelong lager drinker could warm to (pun intended). These are beers that do not dominate conversations the way a 100% Brettanomyces Black IPA would but subtly lubricate and infiltrate them instead, offering you a safe transition into a wonderful new world of taste and aroma. 

So onto the reviews...

I started with Acorn Madness, a pale, moderately bitter and citrusy beer. Fortuitously 'Baggy Trousers' started playing as soon as I took my first sip. (mental note: must look into beer and music pairing) Rudgate Grain of Britain followed, described in the tasting notes as a 'Tawny coloured bitter. Balanced bitters, fresh flavours and hints of malt on the palate'. My third was Wold Top Headland Red, a sweet, creamy red ale balanced nicely with Progress hops.

The rain still hadn't abated but the beer was flowing, the marquee roof wasn't leaking and everyone was enjoying the music. The opening bars of Madness' 1979 hit 'One Step Beyond' prompted a bespectacled man in a novelty hat to rush out into the torrential rain and start dancing enthusiastically. As each attempt to drag someone out of the marquee to dance with him was met with refusal he admonished us all 'you boring bastards!' I went for beer number 4 - Geeves Gunwhale Dance, a 'pale ale with a dry citrusy bitterness coupled by a zingy aftertaste'. It was excellent, decidedly un-boring and it didn't make me feel like a bastard as I drank it. Goose Eye Bitter 3.9% had too much diacetyl for my tastes and Saltaire Cascade Pale Ale 4.8% which is always good did not disappoint.

Beer of the festival has to go to Abbeydale Profundity 4.1%. A deep brown ale with sweet roasted notes, a healthy dose of bitterness and lots of complex fruity aromas. Profound indeed.

Hello, I'm Johnny Beer.

I like beer.
I like drinking it.
I like talking about it.
I like swishing it around in my glass, sniffing it and pretending to look like I know what I'm doing.

So I figured -  hell, I may as well start writing about it too.

Enjoy the ride,

JB