Fleur De Lis
Four Quarters Brewing Co.

bright tartness and acidity, mellow grassy and straw notes, grain, lemony and crisp green apple, subtle must and barnyard some mellow hints of pepper and oak. somewhat assertive tartness is nicely rounded out with fruity and earthy funk qualities. high amount of carbonation, quite fizzy, i think it works though!

This one pours a dark and slightly hazy orange, with a small head, and lots of lacing.

This smells like white wine, lemon, oak, and slight acidity.

Four Quarters is so ridiculously under the radar. This is really nice and stands up with the best farmhouse ales in Vermont. There’s lots of creamy lemon, hay, acidity, barnyard funk, and oak.

It’s super well balanced and drinkable. There’s a nice crisp and slightly creamy mouthfeel, and a normal level of carbonation.

This is a most excellent saison. Four Quarters is sneakily making some of the best beer in VT.

 

 

 

Corked bottle dated feb 11 2016 poured into two steamed wine glasses. Pour is hazy peach with a fizzy white head that fades! No lacing on the glass even when consumed! The smell is lemon, white wine, pepper, honey, funk, hay, tart! The taste is lemon, tart graps, light citrus , tartness, and subtle hay! The feel is light but slick and leaves a coating in my mouth and also fizzy (wierd-but good). Overall I am gonna try and get another and age it for a while!

 

 

im not sure if they did a version that was aged for an additional amount of time in red barrels, or if the one i had at the brewery was the same barrel fermented beer as the one listed here, but mine looked nothing like the one on their website, and tasted nothing like what others described here. it was reddish from the tap, thick and still, almost totally lacking carbonation and head. the nose is heavy lactic acid and red wine and oak tannins. its far more sour than it needs to be, and it comes at the expense of whatever saison yeast they used to do it, almost cheesy funky too, weird and not my favorite. i do like all the grains in the base though, you can taste them at different times, and the body added by the oats and wheat is pretty awesome, especially in a beer this low in alcohol, but nothing about it seems delicate or even entirely correct since its so flat. sharp to drink much more than a glass of, and even worse as it warms up. i must have gotten a funky pour or there must be an additional barrel aged version that they were serving up. i was the least impressed with this of the several beers we had here...

 

Acquired in a trade, early 2016. Served in a Duvel tulip at fridge temp.

Look: hazy brass, white head that disappears complrtely

Smell: smells sour, like white wine

Taste: moderately tart and fruity

Feel: medium-full

Overall: refreshing, Summeryy. Nice after Father's Day dinner

 

 

 

 

Straight pour from a 32oz crowler (filled about seven hours ago at the brewery) to a narrow teku-style wineglass. This is my first time with a crowler, and I’m curious to see what it’s like. This has been refrigerated for several hours.

Appearance (2.25): Kind of a rough pour because of the balance of the container, but it pours out a a cloudy, peach-tinted, straw-colored body—actually, I’m pretty sure this is what you call “flesh” in a box of crayons. It looks like peach juice blended with strawberries. There was a bit of aggressively crackling foam right off of the pour, but it didn’t stack and dissipated quickly. This looks a lot more like a Berliner, quite frankly. It’s got a pretty body but doesn’t look anything like a saison should.

Smell (4.25): . . . aaaand it kind of smells like one, too. Underripe peach, tart, green grapes, crusty, sourdough country bread, the sour smell of lacto (it’s like plain, unsweetened Greek yogurt), a bit of red wine tannins, and just a hint of something like strawberries. This smells like an outstanding Berliner weisse, but a saison, I’m not so sure. So far at least, I’m not complaining in the slightest.

Taste (4.5): Here, at least, it tastes like a saison—just, a saison blended with a Berliner. (Again, not complaining.) There’s a pale, dry, but soft malt base that betrays the oats in the recipe, not as strong or tangy as the sourdough scent in the aroma would lead you to suspect. On the flipside, there’s the tart, citrusy snap of unsweetened lemonade, a rounded, but subtle sweetness on the backend like watered down papaya juice, a very soft spice component buried underneath the malt and sour flavors, like a little white pepper and coriander, but it’s barely discernible after the sourness. Gooseberry, underripe peach, and a clean, lactic finish. Very, very refreshing.

Mouthfeel (4.5): Very subtle carbonation allows the sourness of the palate to do its thing without being overwhelming or scrubbing every available surface. It’s still dry, but the soft feel from the oats smooth out everything else—the lactic acid, the lemony snap, the tannic undertones, they’re all met with the silky feel of oats in a pale beer. It feels more like a saison, actually, because of those oats.

Overall (4.0): In the end, I’m critiquing this beer for what it is, which is a pale, well-crafted sour with an extremely soft base of oats. It doesn’t meet almost any standard for a saison, and if you handed this to me and said it was a Berliner, I’d say “yep, makes sense.” That said, it’s delicious. It smells great, it tastes fantastic, it feels soft, tart, and refreshing, and it looks like a Berliner. (Which, as one of the least attractive styles of beer out there, is not a compliment—though the pinkish hue in the body is really pretty.) What a trip. Long story short, this is delicious and everyone should try it.