100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #7
St. Amand is a bière de garde, basically the French version of the Belgian saison. The underlying philosophies are similar—folks get mighty hot and thirsty working out in the fields all day, so a sensible farm ought to have some beer handy—and the beer is traditionally, and this one particularly, brewed in French Flanders, putting it even closer to Belgium. But the French take on brewing winter beer for summer consumption is sweeter, maltier, and doesn’t go nuts with the spice cabinet like its Belgian cousin. The result is something better suited for sipping over a two-hour lunch than something to swig between swings of a hoe.
St Armand came in a thick, brown 750mL bottle with a champagne-style cork. The label has a brief blurb on the style, a list of ingredients (“pure artesan well water, barley malt from the Champagne region and hops from Alsace”), and a mention of the alcohol content, 5.9% by volume. It pours a coppery brown with a big, off-white head and smells sweetly malty with some orange. The sugars from the malt give the beer a slightly syrupy feel. It tastes sweet, orangey, just a little bit grassy and bitter and finishes mostly dry. In all this is a fairly straightforward beer, but a tasty one, a good drink for a meal at the end of the day.
So that’s a week. Out of the seven, there were only two that I didn’t enjoy, so I’d say I’m doing pretty good so far with the selections. Let’s see how weird they get in the weeks to come.