Little Sure Shot
Olds College Teaching Brewery

If I understand the genesis of this beer correctly, it was a product of the female students in this year's program at my favourite teaching brewery. This really is a dandy looking, feeling, and tasting saison. It is bright, effervescent, full of stone fruit and bready malt flavor. The is an overall earthy spiciness that, for me, is the trademark of a good farmhouse ale. There are some lovely saisons being brewed in my neck of the woods right now, and this ranks right up there with the best. Well done, ladies, well done!

650ml bottle - the first bomber that we have seen come out of the commercial arm of this teaching brewery, and a collaboration with the college's Office of Sustainability (which sounds just a tad Orwellian, eh?).

This beer pours a clear, bright medium golden yellow colour, with two fingers of puffy, finely foamy, and somewhat fizzy bone-white head, which leaves some random island chain lace around the glass as it quickly blows off.

It smells of grainy and doughy pale and wheat malt, a hint of spicy rye, suggestions of chewed bubblegum, slightly phenolic and funky yeast, subtle earthy spice, and generic grassy, citrusy, and leafy hop bitters. The taste is semi-sweet, mixed and matched Prairie malt (barley, wheat, and rye - grainy, all), some steady, and gently spicy yeastiness, muddled citrus and pome fruity esters, and more plain leafy, weedy, and dried hay-like hoppiness.

The carbonation is fairly tame and innocuous for the style, what with its well understated frothiness, the body a solid middleweight, and mostly smooth, only the yeast making a minor chink in the surface here. It finishes well off-dry, the lingering cereal malt watching the other essences ride on off into that Western sunset.

Overall, a generally agreeable and easy to drink version of a Saison, nothing particularly complicated (and by side-step extension, complex) going on here, but of course that's a-OK. I don't really know what this offering has to do with any sustainability program's aims, other than using all local ingredients (at least the malt), but that's hardly a new thing for this brewery.