A carnival of technology

Chris Lumens started a project to try a new beer for each of the next 100 days, which I think sounds like a great idea.  And then David Cantrell joined in, and I like to feel included.  So here goes.

Saison Dupont

I decided to start things off with a style I’m unfamiliar with, the Belgian farmhouse ale.  The saison ale comes from the French part of Belgium, where it was originally brewed during the winter to serve to field workers in the summer.  It’s light and refreshing, much like a wheat beer,  but with much more yeast, making it taste a little like both a wheat beer and one of those heavier styles that the monks make.

The Saison Dupont came in a 750mL bottle, and I poured my working man’s beer into a simple, working man’s pint glass.  It’s golden, cloudy and opaque, with a head that thins quickly but sticks around for the whole glass.  The smell is almost entirely a bready, yeasty scent, with a little bit of a spicy note, probably coriander.

First, the good: the beer feels very light and is smooth going down but it has enough going on to keep it interesting.  It tastes very yeasty and a little hoppy.  The spicy tastes reminded me a lot of a wheat beer along the lines of Hoegaarden, but the fruity part was more like apple than citrus.  This would be a good beer for a hot summer’s day.

The first thing I didn’t like has to do with this particular bottle more than the beer in general.  When I removed the cork, though it popped about as loudly or quietly as I’d expect it to, the beer quickly started foaming up and spilling out of the bottle.  This made a mess, but it also mixed some of the yeast from the bottom of the bottle into the rest of the beer, leaving me with more floating bits than I would have cared for.  It settled fairly quickly, but those first impatient sips probably weren’t quite the flavor that the brewer intended.

The second thing I didn’t like has to do with the bottle in general: it’s green.  Anyone who’s ever had a Heineken from a bottle knows that stale, skunky taste that months of flourescent lighting can put in a beer, and there was a hint of that in this beer.  If this beer were just bottled in brown I think it could have been a lot better.

In conclusion, I think that the saison style is interesting enough that I’d like to try it again, but I would not like to try this beer again.