A toast

I have come to associate "barrel aged saison" with lambic-like beers. Many's a non-Belgian brewery has turned out beers described as such which had all the joyful sour and oak complexities of geuze. So when I spotted that Ballykilcavan had produced one, I had high hopes. We're not told much else about An Fheoir ("The Grass"), only that Chardonnay barrels were employed, and it's 6% ABV. There's certainly a geuze level of fizz as it pours, with an almost unmanageable amount of foam. The aroma isn't spicy like lambic, but it is interesting, with a hint of Chardonnay's (in)famous butteriness, a dry layer of clean farmyard straw and an odd-but-fun oily coconut waft. The oak is especially pronounced in the flavour, and it's not subtle. You get lots of vanilla and a generous spread of the butter. The saison has provided a clean and crisp base, but doesn't present much flavour of its own. There's no sourness, not that the brewery said there would be, and only the faintest Belgian-style spicing

by noreply@blogger.com (The Beer Nut) · source ↗